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Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French | Alexander Hurst

www.theguardian.com Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French | Alexander Hurst

The ‘right to disconnect’ has changed France for the better – and could soon be law in the UK too, says Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst

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24 comments

  • Practically speaking, I already do: I told them not to contact me on my cell if they aren't going to give me a work phone or reimburse me for the cost of a plan then I will not be using my personal phone for work purposes. They can reach me during business hours on my desktop phone, the work messaging system, or a ticket. If anything happens outside of those hours and they want me to do something about it, they better pony up for a plan, overtime hours, or flex hours.

    Firing me seems highly unlikely because they agreed to these terms, I am very good at what I do, and they love me. Actual legal protections sound like something everyone should have though, if you're on call you damn well better get paid for it or it's wage theft pure and simple.

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  • I guess I’m really lucky to have this right. Every day after my 8 hours are done, I have my slack notifications automatically muted and I fully shut down my work laptop. My boss knows if she really needs me, she’ll have to call my cell, and she has never once done that. There’s nothing quite like a little bit of mutual respect.

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  • In my case it kind of comes with the job. Anyone who works "in the cloud" and/or with web apps / servers and/or database servers knows what I mean. We do our best to minimize issues and keep things running smoothly during off hours. But of course, complex systems can and do break for myriad reasons. Sometimes we overlooked something. Or sometimes there's an event beyond our control (ClownStrike, anyone? AWS outages, anyone?).

    So, for emergencies / unforeseen problems I expect it to happen and don't mind pitching in to help.

    But my boss is also a workaholic who works almost every single weekend. He's bad about texting or emailing us at weird hours and it's annoying. Even if he doesn't expect us to do anything right then, it still causes a mild panic when the phone lights up. And then you're thinking about work shit when you shouldn't have to.

    One of the other managers where I work does a cool thing where he'll put a "delay send" on his off-hours emails so you don't get them until the next business day. A real act of kindness and consideration on his part. Unusual for an American manager.

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  • Australia's 'right-to-disconnect' law actually comes into effect on Monday :)

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    • How did y'all manage to get that law in place... Based on juice media coverage of AU political scene about looks about as dystopian corpo parasite regime as the US

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      • Because we aren't actually that similar? Not that I blame you, a bunch of my own countrypeople are convinced of the same thing. In my opinion, Australia is the example of what the US could be with actual election laws:

        1. We have Instant Runoff Voting (ranked choice). I'm in my late 20s and have never voted for a major party, without messing up my own future.
        2. We have mandatory voting. We can argue about whether that's good or not, but the important outcome is that the government is obligated to make voting easy.
        3. We have a fully independent federal Electoral Commission. It is against the law to be influenced by a political bias in your job if you work there, or to be a current party member.
        4. When they redraw electorates, they must try to get them as close to a "0% swing" as they can, while following other rules around them being usual shapes.
        5. Electorates are redrawn when they hit a standard deviation from the mean population.
        6. Unions were never crushed in the same way here. They hold a decent amount of power in the political process, as the major left wing party gets the majority of their funding from union donations.
        7. We have strict campaign funding rules.
        8. The right-wing can't even elect one party to government. They're a permanent coalition between two right-wing parties. They are constantly infighting. When in Government, the larger party's leader is Prime Minister, and the smaller party's leader is Deputy Prime Minister, always playing second fiddle.
        9. We have elections of the full house and half the senate every three years. That means the entire senate are up for election every six years, instead of eight. We have 76 Senators across a much smaller population.
        10. Neither of the major parties has had a majority in the senate in over a decade. The current government holds 25 seats while the crossbench is composed of 20 seats, including 11 Greens senators.

        So yeah, our politicians do get up on their soapbox and bluster on a lot like your politicians. But the will of the people is much closer to reality here, and there are no undecided voters. And when you threaten popular things like universal healthcare, or ignore 65% of the population approving of gay marriage, you tend to lose elections. Hell, our right wing party tried some of the transphobic rhetoric at the last election and they're now in Opposition...

        I do want to strongly note, that my country is FAR from perfect. Even the US has treaties with it's indigenous populations, which enjoy some level of self-government. Australia still does not. Progress slows down here, and it takes steps backwards at times. However, we aren't exactly goose-stepping our way back to the 1950s like y'all are.

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  • How are they contacting anybody in the first place, breaking into their homes? Check work messages when you go to work.

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