Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 449 posts

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

#271

Post by space_oddity »

billybuckwheat wrote: post #3

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…

You've set some healthy boundaries when it comes to work-life balance, which is great!

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

#272

Post by snapcaster »

commandlinefan wrote: post #251

I mean... this is a nice thought and all, but all this means is that Australian employees now have the right to be the part of the "difficult decision to reduce our workforce in order to better align with our long term strategic objectives".

This doesn't end up being totally true right? Americans have MASSIVELY more labor protections than Vietnamese people but we're more productive. I don't like the assumption we can't ever improve anything for anyone because it reduces competitiveness. It's unproductive and also appears to be ahistorical when we look at other changes to labor practices over time

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

#273

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Draiken wrote: post #199
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but this is one of the things people are talking about when they worry a regulation might make companies less competitive. Online 24/7 is table stakes for any company that aspires to have a global presence - nobody in Europe or the US would buy Atlassian products if they were only guaranteed to be available during business hours in Sydney. If Australia successfully shifted the culture on this, Australian software would struggle heavily to find success on the global markets.

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

#274

Post by ivann »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
billybuckwheat wrote: post #3

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…

This does not stop an employer from potentially disciplining or firing you. Laws do, because they bind. Implicit contracts and hope are not a strategy, with regards to worker rights and protections.

Wait, can an employer fire you even if you didn't make a fault? What country are you in?

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

#275

Post by consteval »

ghaff wrote: post #269
consteval wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're talking key infra Not in the US. I mean, not culturally. Trains here are viewed as a plague, as stupid, as a waste of time. Of course they're really important and move around a lot of shit. I would not be surprised that the train company doesn't give 2 fucks about trains. Nobody cares about trains. If you asked the average American if shutting down the railroads would be a good thing, they'd probably say yes.…

Freight rail is absolutely key infrastructure even if the average American doesn't think about it day to day. No, except for a few places (including commuter rail in some cities), Americans don't care about and aren't willing to pay for passenger rail given that they can drive or take a plane.

Americans do not care about freight rail and they do absolutely despise it. You can go ask Americans (hint: I live here).

There are cultural issues here as well as economic ones. You're not viewed as doing something important or something innovative, and I'm sure that can discourage you from doing it right. And if you do it right - who cares? The expectation is to do it wrong.

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

#276

Post by mapt »

ghaff wrote: post #263
neom wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

A lot of the time, private equity (like MBAs etc.) is a convenient bogeyman for why crappy underperforming companies are crappy and underperforming. But private equity often gets involved because they are crappy and underperforming (or are just in a line of business that doesn't have good prospects any longer).

A small fraction of the time, private equity is brought in to make an ailing, breakeven business profitable.

Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets.

And then the third portion of the time, the business is generating reliable, modest long-term returns, a "blue-chip" company. Private equity doubles down on future growth that is not projected, gets the company into debt to the owners, makes it worthless, compensate themselves in stock with bank leverage, issues themselves further priority stock, files bankruptcy to get rid of the pensions, and on, and on, and on with various tricks to sack whatever assets the have on their books and whatever cashflow was generating a reliable 5% return before private equity got involved.

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

#277

Post by ghaff »

consteval wrote: post #275
ghaff wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freight rail is absolutely key infrastructure even if the average American doesn't think about it day to day. No, except for a few places (including commuter rail in some cities), Americans don't care about and aren't willing to pay for passenger rail given that they can drive or take a plane.

Americans do not care about freight rail and they do absolutely despise it. You can go ask Americans (hint: I live here). There are cultural issues here as well as economic ones. You're not viewed as doing something important or something innovative, and I'm sure that can discourage you from doing it right. And if you do it right - who cares? The expectation is to do it wrong.

I'm not sure why I would hate rail cargo transportation. It's pretty invisible for the most part and beats having a lot more trucks on the roads.

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

#278

Post by nine_zeros »

consteval wrote: post #270
bruce511 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on. Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse. Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on. Of course there are companies, too many of them, tha…

I disagree. The fundamental idea of a company causes this behavior. They, the company, actually doesn't have a choice. You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it. You might say "well you can be less exploitative" - but not really. Because you ALSO have to thrive in your market. Even…

> Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time.

Largely true - but the key word is "almost".

> You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it.

But this is NOT the only way to achieve lower prices. Lower prices can be achieved by simple things like keeping your employee turnover at a minimum, not going through rounds and rounds of layoff+hiring cycles, not wasting time on "performance reviews" and other BS management activities - and generally treating employees and customers as an asset. This is automatic cost savings that can be passed down to the customers.

Do you know why customers are willing to pay higher prices at Trader Joes? It is because the store is always staffed, clean, and full of inventory with happy employees.

There is clearly a higher quality way of winning. The factory-style squeeze and replace seems rather naive and stupid from a branding and long term return perspective.

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

#279

Post by AnimalMuppet »

consteval wrote: post #261
euroderf wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.) ?

> We're talking key infra Not in the US. I mean, not culturally. Trains here are viewed as a plague, as stupid, as a waste of time. Of course they're really important and move around a lot of shit. I would not be surprised that the train company doesn't give 2 fucks about trains. Nobody cares about trains. If you asked the average American if shutting down the railroads would be a good thing, they'd probably say yes.…

So what? Whether railroads are critical infrastructure is a totally different question from whether the average American cares about railroads.

Most of us (myself included!) didn't think of grocery store workers as critical, either. We learned that they are during Covid.

(New on my list: The person who refills the toilet paper in the restrooms at work. I saw this guy doing it one day, and it struck me how critical he was - what an absolute catastrophe would happen if nobody did that job. But if you ask the average person, that is a totally unimportant job.)

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

#280

Post by corytheboyd »

space_oddity wrote: post #267

When I first started working, I would respond outside of working hours, work overtime, and try to please everyone. As I got older, I developed a rule: as soon as I finish work, I just ignore all work chats, calls, and emails. Did it affect my well-being? Yes, I highly recommend it to everyone!

Seriously, just don’t install (or log in to) Slack on your phone. Started doing this myself a few years ago and it has been great. I have a pager, page me if you need me. It’s just… normal to not be obsessed with work.
Post reply on HN