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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

#151

Post by darth_avocado »

tbrownaw wrote: post #124
grayhatter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't, or at the very least, that wasn't my read and I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation. The comment starts with the topic, shock at the lack of curiosity from a group happy to comment in the theme of news interesting to hackers, and concludes with an argument that someone sharing their life/experience is something valuable. IMO, the only reasonable argument one could take, is that roughly beli…

I don't really see any other interpretation of saying that if someone says you're wrong you should update your worldview. There isn't much that could be other than a call for unquestioning belief.

You’re ignoring the context of the comment to make a point. The comment was directed towards a specific type of discourse which was based on personal experiences. This is very different from a discourse where the opposing viewpoints arose from different information or interpretations of the same information, the information being grounded in a standard other than “my personal limited life”. No one is calling for unquestioning belief for ALL conversations, but a few of them don’t need to be cross examined.

If someone shares a story of a terrible interview experience on HN (which happens often) and I claim that bad interviews don’t exist because I’ve never experienced one, do we now expect people to litigate the fact that bad interviews do in fact exist? Or do we just downvote my terrible take and move on?

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

#152

Post by quadrifoliate »

nfw2 wrote: post #143
preg_match wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If long and irregular hours are expected, then those hours should be tracked and paid out at a rate. Companies absolutely abuse salary exemptions and it’s getting ridiculous. If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly empl…

If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. If that isn't amenable to you, don't agree to it. Why does this government need to butt in?

Again to my point, there is a lot of "I" in your comment. What this legislation means is that on aggregate, the politicians sponsoring are hearing from their constituents that they are being overworked via expectations of off-hours communication. This might not be the case with you.

> If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. Why does this government need to butt in?

This legislation...does not affect you then. All it's saying is that the employer cannot require you to respond to something on 9pm on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday unless you are paid for it. You are still free to do so, it's just that your employer can't fire you if you don't. This seems sort of reasonable to me.

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

#153

Post by quadrifoliate »

lpolovets wrote: post #135
beAbU wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very first paragraph in TFA says: > ... rules on when and for what reason an employer could contact an employee outside of a normal work schedule. This is no blanket 'thou shalt not call thy employees after hours' law. All this is doing is preventing employers from effectively pulling a bait and switch, by implicitly expecting employees to be available 24/7 for whatever reason. If you've ever been in a situation…

IANAL so maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but my understanding of the bill ( https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduce... ) is that you have to compensate for the full set of hours of availability even if no work is being done? I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bil…

> I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates).

If your need is so urgent that you would fire the EA for not checking the email between 5-9pm, then you are exactly the sort of over-reaching employer that the bill is targeting. You have two options:

- You can say that the EA must check at 9pm and pay them 1.5x the hourly rate for an hour. If they don't do it, you can fire them.

- If the EA is free, they still may check and schedule between 5-9pm, but you can't fire them if they don't. You can only fire them if they don't do it correctly between the 9-5 hours. This way you don't pay any overtime, but you don't overreach either.

This seems to reasonably reflect the value you place on after-hours work.

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

#154

Post by yamillove »

shimman wrote: post #125
yamillove wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Telling people they should get a better job implies that there is work where YOU think the workers deserve to be taken advantage of. Why IDK, guessing you hate people fighting for better quality of life through democratic norms. People rightfully hating tech workers nowadays makes so much sense.

[flagged]

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

#155

Post by quadrifoliate »

antonvs wrote: post #148
lpolovets wrote: post #106

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 d…

> But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening Thanks for making the case for laws like this.

Exactly, the loosey-goosey "Just do it a few times in the evening" is the real trigger here. How many times exactly?

The more you try to quantify this, the better the case for the law gets.

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

#156

Post by lostlogin »

throe9393i44i wrote: post #5
edent wrote: post #3

Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times. I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping. I wish that was a feature on modern…

Second phone?

I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night.

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

#157

Post by jackfischer »

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…

Why is this a government issue at all? It was unclear from the article why some contingent that doesn't like their relationship with their employer ought to be able to inflict their solution on everyone in Michigan via politics as the mechanism instead of the market

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

#158

Post by nunez »

Getting a separate phone and phone number for work has been one of the biggest quality of life improvements for my work life balance.

It's a small change in the macro, but doing this enabled me to (a) choose the device I want, (b) keep work stuff off of my personal phone, and, most importantly, (c) COMPLETELY disconnect from work when the day is done. This became necessary after COVID induced WFH forced work into the home and expectations around being "on" all of the time became more pervasive.

That said, "Work Profile" is one of Android's best features, and I'd love for iOS to have something equivalent. It's not as good as a physical separation, but it's the next best thing.

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

#159

Post by nunez »

roughly wrote: post #58

There's a weird incuriosity in the responses here for a place that calls itself Hacker News. "This doesn't happen to me" is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them. Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. Ev…

Teachers have it the worst. For many of them, there is no way to do the job right without bringing work home and being available after hours.

Tech sales can be just as bad. This is more understandable, but if customers didn't work outside of work hours, sales folks wouldn't need to either (since speed outside of work would no longer be an advantage).

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

#160

Post by bellowsgulch »

roughly wrote: post #58

There's a weird incuriosity in the responses here for a place that calls itself Hacker News. "This doesn't happen to me" is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them. Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. Ev…

Despite dang and others saying x or y about Hacker News and how such and such is a noob opinion—-the people themselves, the demographic, has changed and I’ve seen it over the years.
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