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Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

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Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?

> Where do you draw the line? If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device". My private phone is not for their use, ever.

Seems pretty in line with a recent frontpost of "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It " [1].

There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689859

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#32
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second phone?

Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.

> Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck

My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#33
This seems mostly good for restaurants, some concerns I had from the title seem to be handled reasonably.

It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?

Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?

I would install the app on the shittiest iPhone backup i have (I must have like 10 iPhones by now, i dont sell old ones) You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP…

>You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)

Only if they're using RFC 6238 TOTP, and not some weird 2fa app. It's ironic you mention authy because they have their own weird TOTP scheme, along with push notification based approval system.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#35
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a major function of the law is to mediate between groups that have unequal power as a collective, employees out-vote employers and can obtain this kind of concession through the law but not in an individual contract negotiation (mancur olson notwithstanding) taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?

I'm just going off the summary document [0], but the law doesn't seem to require any particular working hours. It just says people should stick to them once they've been agreed. That's already implied by having working hours. The whole bill basically just tells the regulator that the legislature thinks the fine for not sticking to the employment contract should be up to $500 which is probably redundant since I assume…

> I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts

....what contract? There's no contract in most cases and contracts that exist very rarely define hours. I've never encountered one that did.

> seem to require any particular working hours

This isn't about enforcing hours, it's about communication during hours you're not being paid for.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#36
post #18

I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs? I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day. In the roles where on…

It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.

Usually about covering shifts.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#37
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to be the "troublemaker". In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.

>In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause. Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, a…

Dude, your characterization of me being an arch user with an ancient latop is clearly in bad faith.

Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#38
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.

Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?

One of the biggest banks in the US forces staff and contractors alike to install a proprietary 2fa app on their personal devices. if you can get a company phone, you can't finish activating the MDM, to install the company 2fa app, without first using that 2fa app on your personal device. Even a company yubikey can't be activated without the 2fa appp, which again, you can't get on a company device without first installing it on your personal device.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#39
post #4

[flagged]

You have a point, and I share your general concern with bureaucracy. However, I'd encourage you to consider how I've seen employment law situations like this play out in practice.

Some examples:

* Management pressuring someone to forge tax documents, and firing said employee when they refused. They even provided a written statement stating this as the reason.

* Someone getting fired for refusing to use grant funding outside of its designated purpose.

* A government employee was accused of corruption and was asked to step down quietly. The city wanted this employee's replacement to take money from one part of the budget for a hush-money payout, while keeping this secret from the city council.

* Someone taking maternity leave, then having her role eliminated. She was given the opportunity to apply for a new job when she returned from mat leave.

* Someone getting laid off while on mat leave. No option for another role.

On paper, all of this was highly illegal, and any employer operating in good faith should have been able to work out a solution when confronted. All of them dug in their heels and refused to consider that they were wrong. Followup generally looked like this:

* Employee escalates within the organization. This becomes a negotiation, where the org decides how much leverage they have. Note that the org might not read the law carefully or even at all. If it's gotten to this point, they've often already decided they can get away with it.

* Depending on the circumstances, reporting to some government agency may happen. There may or may not be an agency that can help. Even if there is, don't expect to become a priority or have significant resources devoted to you.

* More negotiation. The org may have lawyers who are already on salary, or at least an HR department that's ready to step in. You likely do not, and need to track down and pay for your own attorney.

* After a lot negotiation, there's some kind of settlement. If this has to go to a lawsuit, good luck paying for those additional costs and managing everything. Meanwhile, you need to find a new job. For the people you're negotiating against, it's just another day at the office and they have all the time in the world.

Having multiple statutes to establish legal claims can be redundant and annoying. It can also reduce ambiguity when negotiating with an employer who is unwilling or unable to respect their liability. Which ends up being more important will be influenced by the details of the laws and the circumstances of each situation.

This doesn't obviate your point, which I agree is important. It's dumb and sad that this is where we are.

Re: Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

#40
post #18

I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs? I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day. In the roles where on…

> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.

I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.

More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.

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