I. THE SUCCESS OF THE “WORKATION” PORTMANTEAU AND OF THE UNDERLYING IDEA OF COMBINING VACATION AND WORK The increasing and by now firmly established success of the term “workation”, a portmanteau of the words work and vacation, suggests the need to verify whether this concept has any impacts on labour law, especially as regards the determination of the place where the activity is performed, in order to identify the applicable law and the court having competent jurisdiction. The term does not simply mean working from places other than the habitual residence, because, should that be the case, it would fall within the ordinary remote working field. Conversely, one of the two components of the portmanteau is “vacation” and means a sort of combination between vacation and some productive initiative, that is to say the performance of tasks during vacations strictly speaking, in the terminology of the EU case law2 and legislation3. That idea is overlooked (not surprisingly) by a large part of the extensive advertising material on this matter, which is spreading more and more widely and which invites to go to places that are workation - friendly as they are pleasant and allegedly feature good supply of suitable offices or rooms in accommodation facilities, along with efficient and rapid connections. For tourism sector players, the guest’s condition is irrelevant, i. e. whether the guest is on vacation or working remotely during the stay under a “smart working” scheme. The Italian law is familiar with smart working and tested it rather successfully4; it means that work is performed at a place chosen by the worker and out of physical control by the employer, being it a company or the public administration, and is different from “working from home”5, under which the employee works from home, but using a pre - set workstation and complying with the working hours, thus enabling compliance to be verified, albeit remotely6. The interest aroused especially by “smart working” (falling within the wider category of remote working) gives evidence not only of the technical transformation of companies and institutions, ready to embrace this change, but 2 See European Court of Justice, Grand Chamber, 24 January 2012, Case no. 282/2010, Maribel Dominguez v. Centre informatique du Centre ouest atlantique, in Lav. giur., 2012, 675. 3 See Article 7(1) of Directive 2003 /88 / EC. 4 See: Perulli, La “soggettivazione regolativa” nel diritto del lavoro, in Dir. rel. ind., 2019, 111 ff.. 5 See: Aa. Vv., Telelavoro, edited by Gaeta – Pascucci, Turin, 1998. 6 5 See: G. Santoro Passarelli, Lavoro etero organizzato, coordinato, agile e telelavoro: un puzzle non facile da comporre in una impresa in via di trasformazione, in WPSCLDE “Massimo D’Antona”, 2017, it., n. 327, 15 ff.. 100 ENRICO GRAGNOLI
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