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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

#101

Post by nekusar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #9
pwg wrote: 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?

If its a standards compliant TOTP 2fa, I don't have any issue in adding those to my app.

If its the terrible MS authenticator or DUO, then get me a device.

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

#103

Post by galleywest200 »

yamillove wrote: post #100

One thing I wonder is how will this politician work an after hours meeting with the citizens. Will she not show up or will she tell her constituents that THEY need to do the meeting at HER working hours?

Citizens are not employees of politicians. Only the politician’s staffers are.

Arguably the politician works for us so we can decide their working hours.

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

#104

Post by throwaway85825 »

gblargg wrote: post #96
throwaway85825 wrote: post #88

Companies that desire on call need to be willing to pay an hourly rate for 24 hours of possible labor.

At least an ongoing retainer fee, plus paying for time spent dealing with comms.

Lots of in office people aren't doing work 100% of the time, they still get paid because they could be asked to do something. Same goes for on call, just with a flipped percentage.

Further for non fixed work schedules any shifts that aren't scheduled two weeks in advance should be paid overtime.

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

#105

Post by calvinmorrison »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #44

Lots of privilege in this thread showing. This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today". Please remember that just because you aren't expected to have consistent unpaid after-hours comms doesn't mean that others don't. Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise emp…

one of the most common in lower paying jobs is just CONSTANT scheduling churn, group texts with the entire restaurant/bar you're supposed to on. Instead of having a normal schedule everything is ad hoc

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

#106

Post by lpolovets »

I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. For example when I was an engineer 15-20 years ago, my friends would deprioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?

I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses:

- handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result.

- scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future.

- if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.

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

#107

Post by bluefirebrand »

yfontana wrote: post #83
pwg wrote: 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.

Having to lug 2 phones around has always seemed like more trouble than it's worth to me. I also don't like having multiple devices to do stuff that a single one could do, for environmental reasons, but that's not a very wide-spread opinion. So I do have work stuff on my personal phone, but with no notifications whatsoever. Only works because I'm in a position where it's acceptable to require all communications to go…

I'm not worried about notifications on my personal phone, I just don't want to install anything work related there. I don't want them to have even a tiny bit of chance of having access to my personal data, photos, browsing, anything

Im with GP, absolutely no work stuff on my personal phone

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

#108

Post by KennyBlanken »

al_borland wrote: post #54

Where I work, in Michigan, people used to be compensated if they were called for on-call work. Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing. I used to get called a lo…

A similar enshittification has happened in my state regarding wages. They slightly increased minimum wage but then stripped out extra pay on Sundays.

It's happening all the time. Lobbied legislators will give some token QoL improvement for the masses and then give the 0.1% a nice big gimme in return.

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

#109

Post by DetroitThrow »

duxup wrote: post #97
bluealienpie wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the media equivalent of showing a family swimming on the lake when discussing heatwave death. You have valid life experience but it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.

It's relevant. We're people sharing and discussing, not a TV show. The idea that if we're discussing a problem that only people with that problem may share their experience is absurd at face value.

"10% of Americans are uninsured. A US state is pushing to insure all of their residents."

"I'm insured!"

"Open-source software projects are being spammed with LLM generated PRs. Contributions are becoming more restricted".

"I have a repo that isn't being spammed!"

Sometimes sharing a somewhat related experience is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and also completely uninteresting. It does not matter that somehow their "experience is valid".

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