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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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.

I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom. Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee). And then we're all working weekends.

This is one of those things that I can see happening, but also has never happened anywhere I've worked.

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

#192

In 2024 it hurts really bad to read all such great news from other nations while sitting in India where industry leaders, startup founders, and politicians are actively trying to impose things like 70 hour work week or so and take away whatever labour protections (which is very little and mostly ineffective and practically none if you are in "corporate") we have and even encroach upon the Sundays and Saturdays (the l…

Oh you're same guy from another thread. You seem like you're on some kind of a mission here. My experience was 100% different than you. You seem to be generalizing from a small sample and paint an entire country with that baseless generalization.

Why would you go this length and do this witch hunting? Do you have some issue in reading other people's views? I have commented this same view twice in different context and you consider that a "mission"? This is a behaviour I have seen so widespread here that it seems like a trend. In fact it's a thing! Go asking on r/india and see how that is. Now that would also be a very small set for you, isn't it? Well, that is definitely orders of magnitude higher than hn when it comes to this particular country. So get a feel there maybe?

Well, what is your mission? Since I mentioned my country's name (which I guess could be yours as well but I am not sure) is this somehow become a "prestige" issue for you?

I don't know whether a tag works here, but @dang is this kind of witch-hunting or attack acceptable here? Or is it rather kosher?

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

#193
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees benefit from calls out of hours. How? The employer is able to offer better service to customers, and make more money, and the employee can negotiate a higher salary from the more profitable business. Employees who are inflexible cannot offer the same level of service to their employer and its customers; they'll on-average be paid less and measures like this increase production costs, making goods and servic…

> This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service. Not at all. It means that if they want employees to be on call they have to pay for it.

This is nearly always a myth.

On call has a huge precedent, it's not tech, it's the health sector.

"Paid" on call is already defined as the active portion where you're responding to a page, not the passive portion where you're carrying the pager.

Some countries have rules around time to respond within the definition of active vs passive, but most do not and the carrying the pager isn't compensated at all.

Even with the active part, time-in-lieu can be the definition of paid... still 40h per week (or whatever), but if you only responded to 1h of active on call in a week, finish work an hour earlier one day the next week.

People in tech like to imagine that their salary rises by some significant %, but it seldom does... nurses and A&E staff aren't paid far more for being on-call and carrying a pager, and that precedent travels far, countries aren't legislating in a way that makes their health services untenable.

Some countries do legislate hard in this area, i.e. France, but then... they have a much smaller tech sector as a lot of companies will avoid hiring there or setting up an office there (especially when neighbouring countries do not have such legislation).

To be clear I don't know what the exact text of the Australian law is, but I'm just clarifying that on call does not have to be paid, and as soon as one thinks about the health service and the impact of such legislation it's clear why. Sure one can also view this as wage theft in every industry, but in that case workers need to go make that case. Most large companies will likely continue to avoid such legislation by treating their workforce as fluid, and just withdrawing from some countries and only hiring in others.

Note: None of the above is reflective of where I currently work, but are things I've learned from prior places of employment.

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

#194

Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags? There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature. I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.

I'm so confused that the manager felt the need to say this or that your country would need such a right for you to have that right (because unless it's in your work contract, you've not agreed to work when you're not working)

Two questions: assuming you have fixed hours, does anyone (colleagues, direct supervisor, big boss) expect you to see messages or emails outside of your working hours? Second question: what culture does your answer apply to?

For me the answer is a confident "no", having worked in the Dutch and German tech sector, mainly in small companies

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

#195

Lots of people missing nuance or seeing this rule change say what they want it to say, rather than what it actually says. Employers are still allowed to contact employees anytime. Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. That’s all that’s changed.

"Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. "

Now you will be terminated for "some other" reason.

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

#196
post #165

This is already the case in Germany. It also applies to vacation and sick days. Above all, it's deeply ingrained in German culture, so that no one expects to reach you outside of your working hours. I help people settle in Germany, and it's one of the main cultural aspects I cover. The other is how normal it is to take sick days.

Netherlands also

The only people that I see working 24/7 are those who run their own business, which made sense to me because everyone else has a contract that stipulates the obligations of both sides. Unless that doc says that you're expected to work outside of work hours (which sounds self-contradictory), that's not part of the agreement. I'm surprised Australia needed a law for that

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

#197

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.

As a math teacher in the states some years back, I worked 6:30 am to 4pm in the building and from and a couple hours most evenings and usually 3-6 hours both days of the weekend. 70+ hours a week. Any holiday was spent catching up on grading. I often recruited my wife to help grade it was so overwhelming. And summer meant trainings and summer school otherwise the summer was unpaid and as a teacher we desperately needed the money.

All in, I averaged three separate weeks (one at Christmas, and one week on either side of summer) a year of stay-cation since we could barely afford food let alone travel.

When I transitioned to software, I nearly cut my hours in half and doubled my pay, nearly 4x-ing my effective hourly wage and had my first real vacation; heck, my first time on a plane even.

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

#198

I don't live or work in any of those places, but I've been ignoring work emails and calls after hours for a long time. Helps that 1) I don't have a work phone, 2) apps that my company uses on my personal phone, and 3) never log into the company network or services on my own laptop. In the few instances when I was called out about it, I asked Could the message/call have waited until the following morning/Monday? The a…

> Helps that 1) I don't have a work phone,

I have a work phone, but that's for making calls and doing other mobile stuff during work hours. Nobody expects me to use it outside of those hours, that's not really related to having one. Do your colleagues only get one when they're expected to be online 24/7?

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

#199
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd much rather keep a normal schedule and get woken up every once in a while than work 5pm-1am or 1am-9am. It would be in the contract you'd sign when you accept the job. It's not like your current workplace will suddenly change the policy and force you to work at night. The world is already full of places with night shift jobs, and you are not currently working at one of those places.

Why isn't it like that? If my company decided to follow a new rule that nobody can be oncall after hours, wouldn't they have to force at least 2 engineers from each oncall rotation into the new shifts? Even if I escape being one of those 2, shouldn't I expect to have 66% fewer day shift opportunities in the future?

Once again the lack of worker rights come into play here. Companies should never be able to change an employee's working hours like that. I'm guessing in the US they can, because they have almost no worker's rights. Where I live this would be illegal.

As for new opportunities, well, maybe? The theory would say these weird hour shifts would cost more and companies would have to think harder about their operations and decide if the extra cost really makes sense. Employees would also ask for more money to work under these hours.

I believe it would simply remove the inherent expectation that every tech product is guaranteed to be online 24/7 without any extra cost to the companies, only to the employees lives. That's a great outcome in my view.

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

#200
post #194

Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags? There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature. I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.

I'm so confused that the manager felt the need to say this or that your country would need such a right for you to have that right (because unless it's in your work contract, you've not agreed to work when you're not working) Two questions: assuming you have fixed hours, does anyone (colleagues, direct supervisor, big boss) expect you to see messages or emails outside of your working hours? Second question: what cult…

The upside to not including such a thing seems pretty low. Maybe people save a few seconds not reading it? The downside seems quite high if you actually want people to understand your expectations about working hours. The signature may not mean much to someone who has been working for a long time but it could matter more for someone who is just starting their first job, or who has come from a quite different working environment, for example.

I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.

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