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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

#171

Post by Propelloni »

red_admiral wrote: post #140

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…

Does the manager also get weekend-rate overtime if she sends out e-mails on the weekend? I mean, she _is_ working! Sounds like an incentive mismatch here. Or is this just a protection of workers on a tariff and does not cover "exempt" employees, ie. most IT people.

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

#172

Post by dukeyukey »

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.

Even then, feels like.its easier and better for everyone if if instead of everyone needing multi-continental teams, you have one team, and if they get woken up and stupid o'clock to fix something, they get extra holiday or pay or something.

I know I like it like that. And I get that not everyone does! But IME, the out-of-hours rota is usually voluntary, so you can choose.

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

#173

Post by paranoidrobot »

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…

My personal experience differs quite significantly.

I burnt out severely at two different companies.

Both issues were directly attributable to management failing to acknowledge or deal with systemic issues, which resulted in huge amounts of overtime and callouts. All with zero compensation, because I was a salaried employee.

One company had a problem with continuing to promise the world to clients, but not setting realistic timelines. When, inevitably, the goal posts were shifted, timelines were not updated to recognise the issue. There was never an explicit "You must work longer hours to finish this", it was "The client expects this to be done by this date.". There was also pressure that if I didn't work more to finish things, that it would fall upon some other member of the team who was also known to be burnt out.

Another company refused to require teams to conduct any form of peer reviews, testing or take on responsibility for monitoring or resolving issues.

Regularly people would commit code and push changes to production, and then walk out the door to go home. When that caught on fire, I'd be required to remote in and resolve whatever issue they had caused. Typically this happened right as I was getting home and trying to eat dinner.

I'm not certain if this law would've helped me in these cases. I like to think it would, but I'm usually not one to make waves until things start to get overwhelming. But it might give others some ammunition for dealing with management and HR.

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

#174

Post by paranoidrobot »

ludston wrote: post #131
scorpioxy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being called to change/schedule shifts is one of the things that I saw in news reports that it's explicitly permitted.

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

#175

Post by I-M-S »

ludston wrote: post #131
scorpioxy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers

Doesn't seems it will make a difference for them either unfortunately

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

#176

Post by potamic »

majewsky wrote: post #153
grecy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get called all the time because our in house infrastructure would fall over, and my apps would crash. It didn’t matter how many times I explained my apps couldn’t run without good infra, and that I wasn’t on that team, and that I had no access or authority to do anything… when my apps when down I got called. So actually, I really don’t like your idea.

Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea. We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (in…

What metrics do you alert on? How do you distinguish between error due to faulty database client vs error due to database disk failure?

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

#177

Post by jajko »

red_admiral wrote: post #140

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…

Even that is not out-of-blue call to devs, rather just PROD support guys if some massive issue happens suddenly.

I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.

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

#178

Post by hgomersall »

euroderf wrote: post #156
KennyBlanken wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't some Indian specific thing. Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces m…

[flagged]

No international conspiracy is needed. It's just a nice little local racket between the banks and the professional sociopaths.

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

#179

Post by aragilar »

RachelF wrote: post #52
nwbort wrote: post #10

Yes, but 'Employers should be able to justify contacting professionals after hours based on common contract clauses that say a worker’s high salary includes reasonable overtime'. See: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/the-right-to-...

For me, the interesting thing about Japanese work culture is that they pay white collar jobs overtime. Paid overtime seems to be a blue-collar only thing in most English-speaking countries.

Paid overtime is covered in my contract (with rates detailed etc.), as is leave entitlements (and even how long I can be expected to work without a break). I suspect my contract is not unusual in Australia.

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

#180

Post by rgblambda »

Ekaros wrote: post #155
rgblambda wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say preparing lesson plans, is that like printing out worksheets or is it literally planning out what the lesson is going to be? I'm not a teacher so am obviously missing context, but I don't understand how this part isn't standardised for every teacher following the same curriculum. It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

Experienced teachers likely have it down. Or can just use whatever was done in previous years. But you have set standards changed every 10-20 years at least. And maybe new textbook that has things in bit different order. Or there is some topical thing. Lesson planning is really looking at book and items there thinking how much time going over it with current group takes and then considering what items or things are n…

Okay, I get it now. Lesson plans are something that can only be done on the fly and are more about adapting to things outside the control of the teacher e.g. one lesson took longer due to a disruption in the classroom.

I was wondering why the people who set the curriculum couldn't just make a year's worth of lesson plans and email them to each teacher. Thanks for the explainer (to everyone who replied).

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