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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

#221

Post by moorow »

zooq_ai wrote: post #91
moorow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a tech consulting company in Australia. What rules are you talking about? The only change that's come in recently that's affected us is the changes to fixed-term contracts, and that's an entirely fair change to stop employees from getting dicked over by bad employers. Likewise, moving super through one-touch payroll is a great change that literally only affects dodgy employers. The reason we're a country that d…

In Tech consulting, you can pass of all your regulations and cost to your client. In fact consulting thrives exactly because of government overreach. Startups are complete opposite of Consulting

Dunno about you guys, but we're not charging doing payroll, management or regulatory compliance to our clients unless it's specifically requested/required by the client.

You could say "oh but that cost is bundled into your rates", but that cost is also bundled into your product fees for a product start-up, so..?

We don't have to do r&d documentation but we also don't get r&d reimbursements. Not a lot else different from a back-office perspective.

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

#222

Post by matwood »

steelframe wrote: post #39

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…

This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.

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

#223

Post by latexr »

Xylakant wrote: post #205
KoolKat23 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have f…

There’s a relevant quote attributed to Bob Carter:

> Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine

Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now, stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision.

I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal detriment and uploaded the result. About a week later, they could see the file had never been downloaded. Turns out the matter wasn’t that urgent and the client had other priorities. My friend was understandably upset, but it was a valuable lesson.

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

#224

Post by snapcaster »

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]

Holy shit not everything is Russia, this is literally mostly americans (and other westerners) doing it to the US. This is a result of capitalism, not everything bad happening in the world is russias fault jesus

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

#225

Post by neom »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #130
crossroadsguy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving…

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…

What PE firm are you referring to when you talk about the railroads and the Ohio incident?

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

#226

Post by latexr »

Aachen wrote: post #204
dan-robertson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to? As for the second, yes that seems like a given. We send each other messages day and night because of that, but nobody expects a response outside of the recipient's working times

> I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to?

The signature in the email.

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

#227

Post by duxup »

PlunderBunny wrote: post #24

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.

That’s been the policy at every company I worked at.

The only exception being when I was paid extra to be on call.

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

#228

Post by euroderf »

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]

(replying to myself...)

One might accept this crap as inevitable if we were talking about a consumer market, like for barbeque grills or dog food or some such. But railroads? We're talking key infra.

So, which totalitarian dictatorships are behind this wrecking of America's railroads ? Russia? China? Norfolk Southern (et al.) ?

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

#229

Post by teeray »

silisili wrote: post #147
KoolKat23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

> Whoever smelt it dealt it

Until whoever dealt it just leaves the team. Then it’s everyone’s problem.

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

#230

Post by neom »

Akronymus wrote: post #216
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't breathe reading this. I had no idea it was THIS bad, these private equity firms need to be reined the hell in if not eliminated and legislated against. Make them do something useful to society or tell them to get bent

I am sure you heard of red lobster going bankrupt because of endless shrimp. Well, that wasnt actually the case but once again private equity. They forced red lobster to sell off their land/buildings to a PE controlled entity. Which rented it back to them. Also forced them to go to a specific, PE controlled, fish seller. In fact, they got forced into starting the endless shrimp stuff because that seller had too much…

Darden group sold Red Lobster to GGC because it was massively underperforming in it's portfolio due to mismanagement through the 90s. GGC wasn't able to make much headway with it, and so it sold 25% to a vendor on the supply chain as part of debt restructuring and forgiveness, that allowed them to get some unit economics back into reality and the owner of the supply chain company took the rest of the position to continue the work of re-building the supply chain. Should the PE firm have involved the vendors in that way, maybe not, however it seems it was a decent enough strategy in terms of thoughtfulness.

Red Lobster had a death rattle long before PE got involved, PE is just a convenient story.

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