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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed the limits of globalization and the fragility of our societies. On the other hand, it has also accelerated the pace of the digital transformation underway (Schwab, 2016). Notwithstanding the subsequent deep economic crisis, the resilience revealed by the society and the economy owes a lot to a vast range of solutions based in telecommunications and ICT in work organization, services, sales, education and telemedicine. The rapid extension of teleworking represents a major change that is likely to be not fully reversed after the pandemic. In addition to the benefits provided in averting a dramatic blockade (stoppage) of the system, it has also revealed or deepen inequalities among workers, between those who may work from home with adequate access to digital devices and those who cannot. Work-life balance is both a major objective for employees and a big challenge for enterprises. Teleworking may contribute to this balance. It occupies a central place in EU social policies, especially related with the working environment and organization associated with work-life balance, health, performance and workers' perspectives (Eurofound, 2020). In this paper, we will address theoretically and empirically the extension of teleworking and its socioeconomic, legal, and ethical impacts in advanced countries, with a particular focus on the Portuguese case. We will draw on official data and recent surveys carried out by the European Commission agencies, the OECD, the Portuguese Statistical Office, and other entities, such as research institutions, international consultancy companies and employers' organizations. We will also analyze the return to face-to-face activity after many workers have experienced the flexibility of working from home. These changes may strongly influence the shape of work organization and labour markets landscape in the short-term an in the future and affect society and economy as a whole (Huws, 2017; ILO, 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transition underway combines different types of technology: digital, physical and biological. These three families of technologies interact, drawing on the progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and creating the opportunity of digitalizing all stages of production and services systems. The increase of digital work represents a deep transformation of economy and society, posing huge challenges to companies, employees and policy makers, and therefore to social scientists. In this context, in European countries, working time regulation has become central to employment policies. The guiding principles of working time management are based on three aspects: the conventional definition of working time flexibility; the development of public measures that aim at making the reduction of working hours advantageous; and the adequacy of working time management to the whole of working life. Advances in information and communication technologies that bring high convenience to personal life are also blurring the lines of work-time and personal time, threatening work-life balance. This situation is raising not only important legal issues, but also ethical considerations related to mandatory or unpaid overtime, and the possibility of employer subtle or explicit coercion. Additionally, the ethicality of unconventional shift work and long work-hour schedules is also at stake in issues like the gender-based inequities related to working hours, and employers' responsibilities for protecting individuals who are not employees from the indirect effects of demanding work schedules, namely affecting the work-family balance. In terms of research methods, after an assessment of the transformations underway, based on literature review and documentary analysis, we will develop a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, which will allow to analyse the position of different key actors (employers' and trade union confederations) on long working hours and their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]