In the present Information Age, teleworking - working from a distance with the support of information and communications technology (ICT) - has been purported to increase the international competitiveness of developing countries, through overcoming the barriers of time and space. In addition, the lower wage rates, the relatively high literacy levels and language skills in some countries, like India, the Philippines and Malaysia, could provide a comparative advantage in terms of the on-line relocation of information processing jobs, or teletrade, from the industrialised countries to the South. It is also believed that with the ‘end of geography’, teleworking could and would reach the traditionally disadvantaged groups, as well as to those in remote areas, bringing about a more sustainable development in society. Women in the developing world, would then be able to partake and benefit from this new and flexible mode of employment, hence increasing their participation rate in the labour force (Mitter and Efendioglu, 1997).

The focus of this paper is to examine whether Malaysian women, through teleworking, could gain positive entry into the Information Society. By using the software industry as a case study, this paper explores the possibilities, fears and barriers faced by women in pursuing teleworking as an alternative work arrangement. It will also contribute to the ongoing debate of whether teleworking will further strengthen or neutralise the unequal gender division of labour.

There are four parts to this discussion. The first section briefly summarises the debates regarding teleworking and gender, while the second part looks at the trends in Information Technology (IT) in Malaysia, with a focus on the software industry. The third section of the paper then zeros in on the software case study, by examining the types of teleworking practices and the role of women in these activities. The conclusion highlights the advantages and barriers to teleworking from women’s perspectives and points to possible teleworking models, based on the experiences of Malaysian women.

In the popular imagination, teleworking is a blessing for women who can combine housework with gainful employment. It offers flexibility to working mothers, can potentially liberate women from male control in the office and provide increased autonomy and creativity for them. For those worried about the degeneration of family ties, teleworking is perceived as bringing families closer together as well as bringing down the divorce rates (Huws, 1996; Gunnarsson, 1997). On the other hand, critics, including trade unionists, argue that electronic homeworkers are actually faced with the double burden of work, and actually work longer hours than if they were to work at the office. Indeed, the empirical picture reveals that women are not necessarily obtaining better job opportunities, and at higher value, relative to men (Bibby, 1996; Oldfield, 1991). At best teleworking offers new work opportunities for women and at worst, it exploits and reinforces the secondary position of women in the labour market as carers and housewives. As noted by Stanworth (1998: 60), 

The effects of the information age on women in the labour market appear to take the form of perpetuation of the existing horizontal and vertical divisions with the bulk of low-skill, low-paid telework jobs done by women, and most of the high status, well-paid jobs done by men. Working in the home does not break down existing segmented sex roles as Toffler predicted, but may reinforce them. There is also no evidence that it breaks down class divisions.                

However, Huws (1996) correctly warns us not to make a simple bifurcation of the impact of telehomeworking on the gender division of labour, arguing that the empirical data reflect a more complex picture. She points out that while occupational segregation in the formal workplace is mirrored in the home with a higher level of professional jobs tending to be held by men and a minority of women, and the other extreme of female homeworkers undertaking traditionally female work, there is also an in-between ambiguous group with the characteristics of both these groups. It is argued that a deeper analysis must take account of the structural factors (e.g. the changing labour market) and the personal motivation of individual teleworkers, both of which are affected by gender, race and class.

While the above debate has been based on the European context, it would be useful to examine the situation in a newly industrialising country like Malaysia, which is determined to enter the digital age at all costs, and which views teleworking as a potential vehicle in providing higher-valued employment to the country. As noted earlier, we will take the software industry as a case study to investigate its potential for teleworking for women, a traditionally marginalised group in Malaysia.

The software industry has been recognised as increasingly being the driving force behind the IT industry. The pervasiveness of computers, both visible and invisible, the increasing role of computers in society as a whole, the advent of multimedia technology and the demand for content, point to the critical need for software as a dynamic segment of the IT era. It is not surprising then that the software industry "has emerged as an increasingly important part of the national economy in many countries …as a sector to stimulate and nurture, offering as it does employment opportunities of a high quality’ (Cochran, 1995:422). The Malaysian scenario is no different.

The critical role of IT is enshrined in the Seventh Malaysia Plan (1996-2000), and was subsequently reflected in the formation of the National Information Technology Council (NITC) which unveiled the National Information Technology Agenda (NITA) in 1996. The seriousness of the government in promoting IT is concretised in the announcement, in 1966 of the ambitious Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). Spanning an area 15 by 50 km, it boasts of comprising a system of capabilities, technologies, infrastructure, legislation and policies, and creating an environment specially crafted to meet the needs of leading edge companies seeking to reap the rewards of the Information Age (Ng, 1997). As declared by the Prime Minister, Malaysia is offering a green field site ‘unencumbered by industrial practices and legacies or entrenched interests. It is a site dedicated to new age electronic commerce’ (New Straits Times, 22 November 1997).

In order to be part of the Information Era, the necessary infrastructure needs to be set in place to support the growth of this generic technology and its multi-various applications. The National Information Infrastructure (NII) is such an infrastructure based on broadband networks and multimedia which will form the backbone of the information superhighway. Hence if teleworking is to succeed as an alternative mode of employment, then the NII has to be set in place to ensure easy access to telematic links for communication, exchange of information and business transactions.

By early 1997, Malaysia’s teledensity was 19 per cent i.e. a telephone penetration rate of 19 per 100 population, excluding a cellular penetration of eight per cent. By the year 2000, a penetration rate of 28 per 100 is expected of telephony and 14.5 per 100 of cellular (Asian Communications, April 1997:17). However in terms of the distribution, the rural telephone penetration is quite low – at 3.1 per 100 in1995 revealing the uneven telecommunication spread in the country. Nonetheless the target of telephone lines penetration by the year 2020 is fixed at 50 telephones for every 100 persons, while that in the rural areas is 25 for every 100 persons.

Malaysia’s teledensity is still low compared to the west and high-income Asia-Pacific countries, but it is more advanced compared to its ASEAN neighbours, with the exception of Brunei and Singapore. Nevertheless Malaysia’s telecommunications growth rate is quite high, making teleworking and teletrade a potential mode of employment in the future. Besides telephony, personal computer penetration and internet usage must also grow rapidly if Malaysia desires to become an IT literate and virtual society by the turn of the century. In 1996 the number of PCs per 100 people in Malaysia was rather low – at 3.7 compared to 24 for Singapore and 15 for Japan. Likewise, 1997 figures show that Internet users in Malaysia represented only 3.8 per cent of the country’s population.

As for the software industry, it can be said that most of the companies have the adequate infrastructure for telework and teletrade projects. Local companies are usually networked within the company on various networking systems such as Novell and Banyan. Some companies have invested in ISDN and lease lines, although these facilities are rather expensive in Malaysia. As a result, companies prefer to subscribe to the local ISPs such as Jaring or TmNet, and use dial-up facilities to network with organisations at the global level.

There are about 600 software companies in Malaysia, of which about 100 of these companies are in development while the rest are in distribution (Computimes, New Straits Times, 30 January 1997). Of the total, 70.6 per cent of their headquarters are located in Kuala Lumpur, while the rest are in Selangor (11.8 per cent), Sarawak (11.8 per cent) and Johore (5.9 per cent). A little more than half (55 per cent) of their branch offices are in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Sarawak and Johore. Hence it can be seen that the IT industry is mainly based in the urban areas and along the western corridor, with the exception of Sarawak.

Although the software industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in the IT industry, it is strongly dominated by sales and distribution of systems software and commercial off-the-shelf applications. Until today, despite the rhetoric of making Malaysia a regional software player, most of the software is still imported from the industrialised countries, as reflected by the strong presence of software MNC giants in the country.

This section discusses the preliminary findings of the ten firms which were identified for the case-study research. Five are local companies, two are joint-ventures, two foreign-based and one is a home-based independent entrepreneur. In terms of employment, about 30 per cent of IT professionals were women in the firms we interviewed, while at the administrative level, the majority of the employees were women. In four of the nine firms, women were highly positioned as project and IT managers, although in terms of corporate leadership, there was only one women Managing Director.

In the Malaysian IT industry, women are able to position themselves into higher professional jobs due to several factors. For example, the education system has encouraged its young population, irregardless of gender and ethnicity, to enter into computer technology fields. Indeed, female computer science students make up at least 50 per cent of total enrolment in the Computer Science or IT Faculties in the public universities in Malaysia (Ng and Thambiah, 1997). For these women, their entry into the fast expanding IT related sectors, despite the present economic downturn, is almost guaranteed. They would also be the potential high-skilled teleworkers who would command a high wage in this labour scarce sector.

The present MSC initiative sees strong encouragement from the Malaysian state in the promotion of IT in all sectors of the economy. Despite the numbers of women and men employed in the IT sector, there is still a gap in meeting the skills sought by the industry. In the software industry, there is a limited supply of specialised skills and hence, the sector is "open" towards employing anyone who possesses those skills, including women. This openness towards the employment of women also coincides with a changing trend in corporate culture. Management practices, such as as "fluid and/or change management", are characterised by a flatter line of authority, decentralised decision-making and a merit-oriented approach towards recruitment and career advancement.

Nonetheless, they only represent a minority of the female labour force, as the majority of women employees are still at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. Hence, in the service sectors which are fast becoming computerised, most of these low-skilled job categories, such as data entry operators and typists, are predominantly held by women. These women also represent a constituency for would-be teleworkers, albeit at the lower end of the teleworking continuum.

Based on the field work, the types of teleworking forms existing in the Malaysian software industry are as follows:

1. Client-based teleworking: Indeed the majority of teleworkers, both male and female, identified in the software industry work remotely on their clients’ sites from where there is usually an electronic link to the main office. They work for as short as one month to as long as four years in the offices of their various clients. Most of the time, the project team is based in that particular site and members go into their main office once in a while for face-to-face meetings, pick up their mail or other matters. The project manager, who usually deals with the client, is normally based in the main office and communicates via e-mail or phone with his/her team as well as visits the team regularly.
2. Outsourced teleworking: This takes place either on a freelance individual/consultancy basis or is contracted to firms when a particular job needs to be done. The work is then undertaken from the place of work of the contractee i.e. his/her office or at the client’s site. However outsourced telework e.g in programming, is minimal as Malaysian software firms, which are still maturing, prefer to depend on in-house staff to customise/develop their products. But, if in need, there have been cases of firms who have used part-time or short-term programmers, usually male, based in the industrialised countries to undertake a certain module due to the lack of local expertise.

In one unique situation, one of the software managers, due to health and traffic problems, became a teleworking consultant. She used her husband’s office as her base of operations rather than work at home due to the presence of small children in the house which she felt would be a distraction to her work.

Generally outsourcing is currently not a preferred option for software companies in Malaysia, except in particular circumstances. This was the case of a company which contracted about 200 data-entry clerks, mainly rural-based girls from different districts, to key in land records in a Land Registration System computerisation project.

3. Mobile Teleworking: Most of the mobile teleworkers are male technicians whose responsibilities are hardware-related. They are armed with notebooks for analysing problems and have Internet access to the head office. In terms of hardware support, the technicians go to the site physically, but software support can be resolved from the headquarters. Marketing personnel, notably male, are also equipped with notebooks and do not have to come into the office first before making their marketing rounds. These employees can dial up to servers to access databases when they are in different towns.
4. Tele-homeworking (informal and formal): These are employees of both sexes who take back work to do at home on an informal and ad-hoc basis. Many senior staff have their own machines (desktops or laptops) at home which are then linked electronically to their office. In terms of formal arrangements, we only noted one outsourced female translator who worked from home on a part-time basis. She had a rather low fixed rate of payment for the various projects undertaken and she did not take part in any of the training activities of the company. As for the home-based software entrepreneur, he had set up his office at home and had spent three years developing an investment package that he is now selling on the Internet.
5. Remote-diagnostics: This form of business activity, whereby a firm accesses the server of its client to trouble-shoot or enhance certain applications, is quite a normal activity carried out by most of the software firms interviewed. This business-to-business telematic activity, which we could call national teletrade, is undertaken either during project implementation, testing or during the maintenance period.
6. Off-shore programming i.e. bodyshopping/teletrade: With the globalisation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) international telework i.e. teletrade is proving to be a popular and cost-effective mode of business operations in the IT industry. Several companies in our research engage in teletrade relationships while two foreign companies see the potential of off-shore programming in Malaysia, in terms of domestic market as well as a regional marketing centre. The two foreign firms we interviewed hired predominantly male expatriates in the Malaysian office.

As can be seen, there are many forms of teleworking being practised in the software industry today. The question is to what extent do these opportunities present clear career paths for female teleworkers? The data show that it is difficult to make generalisations due to the different teleworking forms and occupations involved. What we shall present here are the different types of teleworking arrangements, and from these cases, attempt to evaluate the opportunities offered to various groups of women. A case of a male telehomeworker is also discussed to contribute to the debate on teleworking and the gender division of labour.

Theresa, a partner as well as a Consultant in a joint venture firm, is a full-time teleworker. She was previously a manager of a team of systems analysts and programmers but found it difficult to maintain her position as a manager due to health problems. Moreover the traffic jam and distance from her home to the office, which took about three to four daily commuting hours became very stressful for her, contributing to her health problems. As a result, Theresa decided to resign from the company in early 1997. However, the Managing Director gave her the option to telework, an offer she took up from March 1997. Theresa is paid a Consultant’s fee (including transport allowance) which, according to her, is very reasonable.

The company provides her with the necessary equipment such as a computer, modem, as well as access to the Internet and E-mail facilities. She has her own fax machine and printer. The company pays for the telephone bill and maintenance of the office equipment.

As a teleworker, she comes into the company office at least two or three days a week. The rest of the week she works the normal working hours from her husband’s office. Her husband is a businessman and has his own office that is within walking distance from their home. She found it impossible to work directly from home as she had children who would always disturb her. Hence, she shifted from teleworking at home to her husband’s office. Theresa points out that she is fortunate to have a ‘support network’, as her mother-in-law and a helper take care of her children.

Being an independent consultant, Theresa discloses that she has full authority to discuss prices, negotiate on software details and other technical matters with clients. Theresa points out that she is happy to be given the opportunity to be a teleworker and to continue with her career. She is less stressed, is healthier and her productivity has increased considerably. She says she also spends more quality time with her family. In a nutshell, she enjoys working as a teleworker and has achieved greater job satisfaction.

In 1993, when Joo, upon graduation, applied for a job in a prestigious local firm, she was informed during her interview that she would be working at the client’s site. When we interviewed her in early 1998, Joo had just completed her assignment at the client’s site where she had been teleworking for the past five years. During her term she was promoted from analyst programmer to senior analyst programmer to her present position as systems analyst. Joo said she enjoyed teleworking and found the job at the client’s site quite challenging.

In this project, Joo had to work with employees from three other firms. Initially she and her nine other colleagues had problems adjusting to the different work culture and ethics of these companies. Everyone needed some time to adjust to this team which was made up of employees from various companies. One of the other companies had also sub-contracted about 10 programmers from India for one year and communicating with these programmers was initially difficult.

When asked about the advantages of teleworking, Joo stated that she gained a lot of experience and knowledge by working with employees from other companies. She also learnt about teamwork. In addition, at the client’s site, the employee was involved and focused in only one project. However, at the main office, an employee might be asked to assist in various other projects. As for disadvantages, the only problem was the initial adjustment of working with employees from other companies and the lack of personal contact with the main office. Otherwise she did not face any other major problems.

Wee has been working from home as a software developer since he and his family returned from Hong Kong, where he was lecturing at the University of Hong Kong. His wife, Chooi was with a regional organisation in Hong Kong, and since coming back to Malaysia has been employed by the NGO sector. They have two children, five and four years old and have hired an Indonesian maid to help in household chores as well as to take care of the children. As such, Wee does not deal very much in household responsibilities and his children have been trained not to disturb ‘Papa’ when he is working in his room. However, both agree that Wee’s presence at home has meant that there is a stabilising force in the family. Wee is glad that he can be at home with the children, and does take time off to be with them.

Chooi’s parents and siblings live around the housing estate and the children are sent quite often to their cousin’s house to play. In fact this was the main reason that Chooi decided to buy a house in that vicinity – to be close to her relatives who would provide that support system for her and her family. Wee is fortunate that he has a supportive wife who is the main breadwinner in the family. Nonetheless, she is somewhat anxious about his limited income-earning capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, Wee has set up an office in the house and is quite happy working this way. He is a soft-spoken and quiet person and while amiable, is comfortable working alone at his computer the whole day. He spent several years developing his software investment package but sales have been slow due to the current meltdown, and he is now developing another more marketable product.

Rani is an ex-teacher who majored in the Tamil language, graduating in 1995. She taught for one year, got married and gave birth to a baby girl in 1996. However, as she could not obtain any help to take care of her baby, she resigned from the teaching profession in mid-1996. Her husband teaches computer studies in a local college and was her previous computer teacher. He has developed a Tamil software which is being used in desktop publishing. She prides herself and her family in being a digital family and tries to service the Tamil community by raising their awareness on the benefits of information technology.

In early 1997, they approached a multi-media firm to use their Tamil software in their edutainment product. Subsequently the CEO of the firm offered Rani a job as a Tamil translator of their scripts. She accepted the part-time position and since then she has worked on several translation projects, as well as does voice recording in Tamil. Rani is paid RM500 per project which can take as long as two to three months to complete, depending on the volume of the text. Besides the fee, she does not obtain any other benefits. For example, she does not receive any travel allowance, when she goes to the studio for recording.

Rani works from home and has her own computer and printer in the living room which is maintained by the family. Documents are downloaded to her via e-mail from the company and she does likewise when she has completed the translation. If she needs to fax she goes to a relative’s house; otherwise communication is usually through the telephone or via e-mail. She works 3-4 hours daily, dividing her time between housework and her job. Rani elaborates that she usually works after mid-night; however her husband is very supportive of her work and helps in the housework and childcare.

Rani is quite happy with her home-based teleworking as she feels it is part of her contribution to the Tamil community. She stresses that she does not work for the money but for love of the work. As a result she is disciplined in her work and meets deadlines. Working from home also saves time and energy; she says ‘other things can be done at the same time, there is more control over my work, it is more flexible – I would not have chosen to work if it is not at home’. The disadvantage for her is that she does not get to meet people and that if she were in the office she would learn other things as well as learn to work in a team, inculcating attitudes like tolerance and patience. She is disappointed that the technology is not being utilised to the fullest, for example voice recording should have the technology to transfer voice over the system but this is not used at all.

To be sure, the software industry offers differential employment conditions for different types of teleworkers. The differences seem to hinge on the type of work performed and the skills level of the teleworker in question. Joo, who works at the client’s site represents the young and upwardly mobile male and female IT personnel who are progressing fast up the organisational hierarchy. Their experiences at the client’s site are positive factors in terms of the ability to manage projects independently as well as to work as a team with others.

As for Theresa and Rani, while both are women, they are evaluated differently from each other. As a highly-skilled software professional, Theresa can command more income and is given more facilities, for example she is provided with a computer and fax and her transport allowances are covered by the company. She also has a strong support system – her mother-in-law takes care of her children and her entrepreuner husband offers her an office space in his office. On the other hand, Rani is not provided any facilities and her income is quite low for the amount of work she has to do. The company seems to take advantage of her dedication and her informal work as a translator, compared to professional translators who would be paid more at the market rate. As such she has no prospects for training nor career advancement. What the two women have in common is the support of the family in their choice to be teleworkers. In the case of Rani, the alternative would be no work at all.

Similarly, Wee is able to be a home-based softeware entrepreneur due to the support of his wife, the maid, and her extended family. Despite not earning a regular income, nor his product being a runaway success, his commitment to his work and his belief in his professional ability manages to keep him going. As a man, he is also able to steer away from household responsibilities, a role that Theresa could not abdicate, and thus had to work from her husband’s office to avoid taking care of the children.

Another group we did not manage to interview are the 200 data-entry operators in the East Coast of Malaysia, who have been hired on a one year contract basis, inclusive of the minimum statutory employment benefits, to key in land registration data. They are mainly computer literate girls from the rural areas who have just completed their secondary education and are involved in low-skilled and low paid work without much prospect of joining the company at the end of the contract.

On the whole, software firms in Malaysia practise teleworking on a project and ad-hoc basis, comprising various work arrangements. Except for one foreign firm, there are no formal teleworking policies adopted by the firms we interviewed, although teletrade is becoming a business opportunity for the more robust firms, particularly those which are foreign based.

The most prevalent form of teleworking is client-based where both male and female analysts and programmers have equal opportunities to be remotely placed as well as promoted. There are many others like Joo who have worked off-site and have not been marginalised in the company. In fact, their experiences are appreciated and they have been promptly promoted, irrespective of gender. Their skills have also the potential to be tapped in teletrade relationships, where firms in industrialised countries find it more cost-effective to externalise their information processing activities across borders.

This form of international teletrade has actually been undertaken by one upbeat local firm which has developed a joint software product with an American firm based in Silicon Valley. The e-commerce based product was developed in Malaysia with the American firm hiring a local female project manager to be in charge on the Malaysian side. It was noted by both the Malaysian and U.S. managers that the ability to partake in this higher learning technological curve was due to the openness of both firms to a more fluid style of management and corporate sharing. Hence, as noted by Gunnarsson (1997: 73), ‘when teleworking is not only seen by managers as a means of relocating work but also coincides with modern management strategies aiming at a less hierarchical organization it will probably lead to an increase in gender equality’.

The benefits of being a highly skilled IT professional are also experienced by Theresa, who wanted to resign but was offered the attractive teleworking package. However, this package was not offered to Rani, a translator, confirming the vertical division of labour mentioned by Stanworth (1998) - that class barriers have certainly not been broken by teleworking.

The experiences of Joo, Theresa, Rani and Wee raise concerns over adopting teleworking as a full-scale employment option. The issue of gender and class equity arises in the way skills are graded according to their marketability. In the case of the software industry, it places greater market value on the specialised and professional skills of Joo and Teresa as compared to Rani's skill as a translator. The higher market value of Joo and Teresa also allows them to have "choices" to unburden their dual role as women to domestic maids, whilst in Wee's case, as a man, he passes some of his burden to his wife and maid. In Rani's case, she has little choice. The 200 rural-based data entry teleworkers will also not be able to climb up the occupational ladder due to the absence of IT skills. And firms are not about to provide training for them as in our interviews with management, they replied that they would accept the disadvantaged groups e.g. pensioners, disabled, rural women as teleworkers as long as they have the appropriate skills.

Besides the skills set, another barrier to the ability of the poor in backward areas to benefit from teleworking is the lack of infrastructure facilities in the rural areas. The low penetration of telephony makes it difficult for the rural population to have access to reliable and efficient telecommunication facilities, let alone be exposed to computer literacy. For example, the percentage of students using computers in predominantly rural Sarawak is 16 per cent, compared to 20 per cent at the national level and 80 per cent in Singapore. In terms of economic status, only 8.6 per cent of these students from the lower income group have such exposure compared to 62 per cent of those from the higher income group. Rural women because of their lower educational levels would then be further excluded from the benefits of IT.

Has the domestic division of labour been altered as a result of men and women working at home? The cases above disclose that not much has changed, and women, be they wives, in-laws or domestic helpers, are still responsible for housework. In the case of Rani, the support of her husband was encouraging, and reflects changing gender roles – although she worked at night when her baby had gone to bed.

To conclude, for teleworking to benefit women, it must first seriously consider the existing socio-economic conditions under which it is implemented so as not to reinforce and/or reproduce the unequal social and gender relations in society. Secondly, the kind of model to be adopted must also be gender and culturally friendly. Flatter management organisations seem to be more flexible in terms of providing more gender equity at work. Our findings disclose that Malaysians still prefer face-to-face contact in dealing with each other. Key women activists and academicians are also hesitant about women working from home, given the prevalent gender subordination and domestic abuse faced by Malaysian women. They also point to the lack of space at home, especially for the urban poor who live in cramped two-room low cost flats. Homes might not be suitable places for women to work from due to the fact that very often, several generations live under the same household.

Hence telecentres and/or neighbourhood centres might be more appropriate teleworking models for women as they can also support each other in such community based environments. Women entrepreneurs might benefit from such arrangements as our interviews with them reveal that they see teleworking as a basis for expanding their business networks and for their economic empowerment.

Thirdly, it is critical that the whole family supports whoever has chosen to telework, enabling the domestic division of labour to be shared out equitably by all family members. And finally, for teleworking to be adopted at the national and global level, the state has to provide the appropriate regulatory framework which would not only protect teleworkers from exploitation, but would also enhance their skills in new and creative ways. For instance, policy makers should be aware of the thorny and problematic every-day issues of childcare, health and safety, contractual status, employment benefits and career/skills development opportunities offered to teleworkers, and where necessary, formulate policies and/or regulations to address these issues. In addition, consultation between the government, NGOs and the private sector on joint initiatives in the implementation of teleworking programmes, for example the establishment of community/neighbourhood telecentres, should be encouraged.

Government policies to attract teletrade "investment should also ensure that the competitive edge offered by developing countries for professional services is not centred on the availability of "cheap" or low waged labour. Without equitable policies and regulatory safeguards, the international competitiveness of developing countries would only mean a competitive downgrading of the conditions of employment and work, with or without teleworking.

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