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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

#181

Post by roughly »

functionmouse wrote: post #116
lokar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume good faith. Don’t cross examine.

> assume good faith Becoming harder and harder by the day as the internet and society change, with the bots and the growing inequality and all.

An old line goes that the appropriate role of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Presuming it takes an equivalent amount of effort to empirically validated the opinion of someone who is comfortable and someone who is uncomfortable, morally, where should we spend our effort?

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

#182

Post by al_borland »

sokoloff wrote: post #170
al_borland wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 15 years it all gets lost. When they made the change, I was on a team that didn’t do on-call, because we were 24x7, so our pay remained the same. Eventually I got a new role, also without on-call. One day the boss thought it would be a good idea if we start doing on-call support. There was no pay adjustment for this, no new job I applied for where on-call was part of the deal I signed up for. It just happened. I…

It gets lost in both directions, though. If you get paid 100 total units now for the value you bring to your company, how do you know that you wouldn’t get 95 units base and 5 units of on-call for the identical value that you create?

That works as a thought experiment. Though I think someone getting 5 units for on-call will be less annoyed by on-call than someone only getting their base pay, even if it all shakes out to be at the same at the end of the day.

With the 5 units, if they work more, they get more. With base pay only, every time that phone rings their hourly rate drops.

It may just be optics, but optics make a difference.

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

#183

Post by roughly »

duxup wrote: post #119
DetroitThrow wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

This is a forum where people share their opinions and experience, not a TV show or news story or narrative. If people's opinions or thoughts don't fit a narrative you want, a forum likely isn't the place to find it. Everyone gets to share, there's no rules here about not sharing / having a different experience than others.

You have the right to say or post whatever you want (within the rules of the forum). You will not get thrown out for doing so. You may have other people come along and tell you they didn’t get anything useful from your post, though, which is also their right.

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

#184

Post by sokoloff »

al_borland wrote: post #182
sokoloff wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets lost in both directions, though. If you get paid 100 total units now for the value you bring to your company, how do you know that you wouldn’t get 95 units base and 5 units of on-call for the identical value that you create?

That works as a thought experiment. Though I think someone getting 5 units for on-call will be less annoyed by on-call than someone only getting their base pay, even if it all shakes out to be at the same at the end of the day. With the 5 units, if they work more, they get more. With base pay only, every time that phone rings their hourly rate drops. It may just be optics, but optics make a difference.

Even that scenario works in both directions (as always).

Engineering a system that doesn’t require off-hours work comes with a financial penalty to the team members if there’s explicitly segregated on-call pay. Write a good system and your pay drops to 95 units.

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

#185

Post by roenxi »

Arainach wrote: post #35
roenxi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then there's something that they should actually legislate - before taking someone on as an employee there needs to be a written document outlining what the responsibilities of each side of the relationship are. And if the regulator wants to be helpful the can put out a pamphlet talking about what "reasonable" is interpreted to mean.

If the expectations on employees aren't clear then that is an actual problem that a legislator can try to solve. Legislating what should be a line in a contract as an act is silly.

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

#186

Post by roenxi »

tancop wrote: post #46
roenxi wrote: post #4

[flagged]

> This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract are you saying that unfair terms are a workers own fault for signing? individual workers cant really negotiate employment contract below executive level and staying unemployed is not an option in todays economy. you need unions or laws to make sure everything is fair.

That seems to be a topic that isn't related to my comment or the legislation. Although I am happy to observe that if you sign something you are taking responsibility for signing it.

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

#187

Post by roenxi »

zoobaloo wrote: post #39
roenxi wrote: 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…

> It can also reduce ambiguity when negotiating with an employer who is unwilling or unable to respect their liability.

I'm don't think your comment supports your conclusion. Your comment explains that employers are capable of ignoring the law wholesale and engaging in highly illegal acts, but then you conclude that adding more laws will influence them.

The link seems very tenuous, the comment actually seems to be making a good case that having a law saying "don't phone people" will do literally nothing.

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

#188

Post by 1123581321 »

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…

You really should pay for that expectation. As you describe it, the EA would not be able to schedule any evening activity that took her away from electronics for too long.

The law seems clumsy, but the principle of availability being a sacrifice by the employee is sound.

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

#189

Post by matchbok3 »

functionmouse wrote: post #112
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…

> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. The only reason we get compensated at all is because of legislation. They'll pay us as little and work us as hard as they're legally and physically able to.

In exactly 0 of my hiring decisions, ever, was legislation a reason why someone is paid.

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

#190

Post by _DeadFred_ »

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.

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