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

reuters.com

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

#231

Post by Xylakant »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #214
Xylakant wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have f…

It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality. Margins are ample to cover low wages.

That's true, but that's always true - people with less bargaining power will always have a harder time. Nurses (and other care workers) also suffer from the effect that the people that suffer most from a hard stance on work time are their wards and not their bosses.

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

#232

Post by Xylakant »

latexr wrote: post #223
Xylakant wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have f…

There’s a relevant quote attributed to Bob Carter: > Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now , stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision. I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal de…

I'll steal that quote :)

The advantage of framing it in monetary terms is that clients are very used to thinking in monetary terms. It's not a "no, we won't do that", but a "yes with a cost" that they'll very likely reject on their own terms. And it clearly leaves the door open for something that is really really urgent - be it a genuine emergency or just the result of poor planning.

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

#233

Post by amrocha »

silisili wrote: post #147
KoolKat23 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not work on the weekend, even for an overtime rate. Thanks.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks. It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

I joined a startup a couple years ago, and got handed a poisoned chalice.

It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week.

I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined.

Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.

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

#234

Post by treis »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #201
KennyBlanken wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't some Indian specific thing. Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces m…

I couldn't breathe reading this. I had no idea it was THIS bad, these private equity firms need to be reined the hell in if not eliminated and legislated against. Make them do something useful to society or tell them to get bent

It's all bullshit. Buffet bought BNSF but the rest of the major railroads are publicly traded companies. And Berkshire Hathaway isn't private equity either.

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

#235

Post by hnlmorg »

euroderf wrote: post #228
euroderf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

(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.) ?

Why do you find it so hard to believe that this isn’t just a result of greed?

It’s not like those who are bleeding that infra dry are consumers of the service itself. And couple that with a complete lack of regulation, it means they can continue to bleed the service with literally no consequences for their actions.

This show covers the railroad problem pretty well: https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY?si=5k2vYnONHcWC6aeP

…but I think it’s fair to say the rot introduced by profit at all costs goes waaaay beyond this specific infra. You could apply similar complaints for plenty of other industries too, such as Boeing.

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

#236

Post by amelius »

red_admiral wrote: post #140

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed. Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a…

But employers will strike back with a law: if you read HN during work hours, your rate will be halved.

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

#237

Post by tialaramex »

sumedh wrote: post #195
ghiculescu wrote: post #58

Lots of people missing nuance or seeing this rule change say what they want it to say, rather than what it actually says. Employers are still allowed to contact employees anytime. Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. That’s all that’s changed.

"Previously you could theoretically be terminated for not reading or replying to messages from your employer outside hours. Now there are restrictions on that. " Now you will be terminated for "some other" reason.

Previously, when you show to a tribunal or whatever institution that they fired you for not working out of hours despite insisting it was some vague "job performance" reason, the tribunal says well, that's technically legal anyway, it's just rude, so too bad.

Now, it's illegal. So "some other reason" has to be watertight. If in the process of concocting a "some other reason" you trip another law, you don't get a Do Over because you were trying to break a different law, instead you have more trouble.

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

#238

Post by stubish »

guidedlight wrote: post #69
Prcmaker wrote: post #7

With getting no overtime, no time off in lieu, and managers perpetually confusing a 'problem' with an 'emergency', I'm glad to see this happen. If it will actually make a difference though, I'm yet to be convinced.

It will be most interesting how this applies to teachers, who often have to prepare lessons and mark work outside of hours.

This isn't addressing unpaid hours, just the expectation than your boss or coworkers can communicate with you after hours. Unpaid hours is already illegal. How to enforce that in the education system without it collapsing is the open question.

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

#239

Post by DavidPiper »

I wonder what this will mean for the various forms of on-call. I've seen several policies, I'm sure there are more:

- "Ad-hoc" on-call with no process and you just get a phone call after hours from the boss

- "Voluntary" on-call with a stipend, rotation based among a particular team

- "Mandated" on-call with full over-time pay / penalty rates

Are all of these now up for review? Presumably anything written in a contract takes precedence I suppose.

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

#240

Post by oezi »

amelius wrote: post #236
red_admiral wrote: post #140

I like the Swiss implementation of this. A manager _can_ contact an employee on a Sunday, but then the employee is immediately on weekend-rate overtime even if they just got an email with "deal with this next week". So, many companies have systems that hold back e-mail sent outside of working hours until the next working day unless specially authorised and costed. Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a…

But employers will strike back with a law: if you read HN during work hours, your rate will be halved.

Surveillance of employees is obviously banned anyway.
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