Viktor Orbán's personal consent required for state administration employees to work in home office, resolution stipulates

In 2022, a resolution was passed which stipulates that the prime minister's approval is required if a staff member working in a state-owned or government administration body wants to work in home office, Rtl.hu has learned from an unpublished government resolution from 2022.

The government resolutions coded with a serial number beginning with four thousand are not secret decisions, but their contents are not made public, and their text can only be accessed after a request for information, through a personal inspection of documents. Even though the decisions they contain typically concern labour matters, they affect tens of thousands of public employees, Rtl.hu writes. The aforementioned resolution also affects or has affected tens of thousands of people. It is not known whether this decision is still in force, as Rtl.hu has tried to find out, but has not yet received an answer to their questions.

According to the content of the 2022 government decision, which Rtl.hu has learned about, in cases where a work contract authorising home office work had already been in force, Viktor Orbán's approval had to be obtained retroactively.

Péterné Boros, president of the Hungarian Union of Civil Servants, Public Servants and Public Service Workers, says that it was already clear during the Covid epidemic that the government does not support working from home. She believes that this may be because public administration managers fear confidential data could easily fall into the wrong hands while working from home, although teleworking is now a safe option for the majority of such jobs.

According to the union, employees in regional administration often take home only 250,000 forints (around 670 euros) net. They would like to see a 25 per cent pay rise for these employees, topped up with a one-off 20 per cent compensation.