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Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

reuters.com

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Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#131

Post by ludston »

scorpioxy wrote: post #107
ludston wrote: post #60

My personal experience is that Australia doesn't have a huge problem with this generally. But mileage may vary. If it were a huge problem then vested interests would lobby fiercely against the law, and it seemed to pass without much challenge or comment from the public here. This law might seem like a big deal if you're working in a place without labour protection laws, and therefore you're used to constant abuse fro…

This hasn't been my experience in Australia. I don't believe this law will make a difference at all either. The reason is that if you refuse to do it, then this will come up during performance reviews as something else. "More responsive" or "available for your teammates" or "more of a team player" etc. Of course the manager won't be asking you in any direct way or in written form to be available outside working hours…

The law won't make a difference for us, but it will probably make a difference to the super-market employees being phoned at 6am and asked to take on an extra shift today.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#132

Post by Yodel0914 »

guidedlight wrote: post #69
Prcmaker wrote: post #7

With getting no overtime, no time off in lieu, and managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency', I'm glad to see this happen. If it will actually make a difference though, I'm yet to be convinced.

It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.

The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr).

Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#133

Post by Yodel0914 »

dopylitty wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the crud app you support fell over" is not an emergency. I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed to learn that situations impacting business-critical operations would be considered emergencies. The assumption that Australia just outlawed the concept of having an on-call rotation is not supported by the article. The article says requiring an employee to be on-call 24/7 for general purposes would indeed…

> But completely eliminating planned on-call rotations is not part of the goal. It certainly should be. You want your app supported 24x7 then pay for three shifts. If the government won’t make it a law then IT workers can make it a demand when they unionize.

This seems like a bit of an over-reaction. I do rostered 24/7 on-call 1 week a month. I get compensated for both being on-call, and if I get called.

To run 3 shifts would mean splitting our already smallish team into 3 cells that never worked at the same time. It would actually be cheaper for the org, assuming they could convince the current staff to do it. But it would be a terrible for the team, and for the individuals on the late shift (shift work is notoriously unhealthy).

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#134

Post by BLKNSLVR »

As an unambitious fellow happy to grind away at the bottom of the ladder, this is how I've conducted myself most of my career. My brief forays into management have generally impacted my work-life balance too far the wrong way, and correcting said balance ran into incompatibilities with expectations (not in performance mind you, just in the ambiguous and subjective 'that which is required of leadership').

Y'all can have it.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#135

Post by Yodel0914 »

yawaramin wrote: post #98
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great deal for the lucky 1/3 of developers who get assigned the day shift, but isn't it pretty rough for the majority? I'd much rather keep a normal schedule and get woken up every once in a while than work 5pm-1am or 1am-9am.

Luckily, employees in other parts of the world are in different time zones and their business hours can easily cover our off hours.

A lot of prod support can't be done remotely, for practical (need access to this physical environment) or security reasons.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#136

Post by amonith »

morgante wrote: post #112
intended wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, this insults quite a few startups and firms that don’t believe in wage theft. Getting equity is not wage theft. If the principle behind your equity pay out scheme is wage theft with extra steps, you’ve got a huge problem, and an unsustainable business.

Asking employees to participate in a reasonable on-call rotation is not "wage theft." Your antagonistic/adversarial relationship is exactly what destroys cultures. If you attitude to an outage on a weekend is to ignore it and say that's the company's problem you should simply never join a small startup. You don't deserve equity if you refuse to share in responsibility.

If you do offer equity then that's a slightly different thing. That can be considered payment by those who are willing to take the risk. However, a lot of "startups" in EU do not offer such thing. They do standard employment with unpaid on-call. And those can f right off.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#137

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #132
guidedlight wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.

The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr). Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.

Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning.

I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week lead-time task in addition.

During holidays she's definitely more relaxed, but still spends an absolute sh*tload of time preparing lessons for next term.

She's specifically on one end of the spectrum, but that's also what it takes to get a class of up to 30 students to actually pay attention and make some worthwhile progress at their schooling. She chooses it though, she loves it, she lives for it.

I couldn't do it to that degree without going insane.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#138

Post by Yodel0914 »

sailfast wrote: post #92

How on earth would one even begin to enforce reverting the dismissal of an employee "because they didn't answer their phone after hours"? "Employee was dismissed due to poor performance." "Employee was dismissed because they were not delivering enough value compared to their peers..." These ideas and protections are great in theory, but very hard to manage in practice, and I'd imagine it gets tested on the first seri…

The same way any other labour protection laws are enforced?

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#139

Post by morgante »

amonith wrote: post #136
morgante wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking employees to participate in a reasonable on-call rotation is not "wage theft." Your antagonistic/adversarial relationship is exactly what destroys cultures. If you attitude to an outage on a weekend is to ignore it and say that's the company's problem you should simply never join a small startup. You don't deserve equity if you refuse to share in responsibility.

If you do offer equity then that's a slightly different thing. That can be considered payment by those who are willing to take the risk. However, a lot of "startups" in EU do not offer such thing. They do standard employment with unpaid on-call. And those can f right off.

Yeah I agree those so-called startups deserve your scorn.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#140

Post by red_admiral »

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed.

Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".

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