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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

#341

Post by nine_zeros »

consteval wrote: post #335
nine_zeros wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't be not exploitative. This is not true. Specifically because you are pointing out that exploitative companies will retain more money than non-exploitative ones and thus not be beaten in competition. However, it is paradoxically also true that the same competition is beaten merely by high quality - leading to higher margins. Cost cutting is not the only way to squeeze margins. > Trader joes employees are no…

No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less. This is impossible in a capitalist system, because you go under. It can be done and sometimes is, but we call that charity. I've seen some businesses that take 100% of their profit and just redistribute it to their employees. But they can never expand, only float, and the company…

> No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less.

This is an incorrect understanding of exploitation. Even in the most ethical corporation to have ever lived, 100% of the money earned will not go to labor. The money earned by a corporation is always paid out to

1. Employees/suppliers

2. Government

3. Shareholders

4. Company's own balance sheet

The exploitation part happens when companies cut on 1 to boost 2, 3, and 4. They do so to boost margins.

But strictly speaking, they could cut 2 via tax deduction maneuvers, cut 3 via shareholder return cuts, and cut 4 via plain old not saving more.

Cutting 1 is the most visible cut there is. Within 1, they could cut labor, quality, suppliers, advertising, what have you. Everything is shortchanging the company.

There are so many levers at play here. Exploitation only starts at stripping your company's assets (labor, loyalty, real estate, supplies, customer goodwill) in order to boost other aspects - usually 3 and 4.

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

#342

Post by makeitdouble »

skizm wrote: post #243
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…

Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

This is probably closer to the billing of on call staff than just "overtime".

For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.

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

#343

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

test1235 wrote: post #127
warbeforepeace wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.

>I work for FAANG and have had one page literally a page? with a pager?

I have a literal pager because my company wants to take over my phone with their software and have the ability to wipe it out any time they wish. No thanks, kiss my ass. They will not provide a work phone either. An actual pager was the only alternative.

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

#344

Post by gwbas1c »

dathos wrote: post #292
gwbas1c wrote: post #283

> But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added. Whenever I encounter someone professionally who can't deal with a little ambiguity about when it's appropriate to interrupt someone; I feel like I'm working with a child trapped in an adult's body. "Ch…

I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality. I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?

I'll try to explain it a different way:

I once had a manager who, after working with for 6-8 months, gave me the impression of "working for a child."

He would interrupt me all day for very trivial matters, and insist that I drop what I'm working on to address some email that just came in. (And what I was working on was from email that came in yesterday, that I dropped what I was working on yesterday to start...)

Any time I started any task that required any significant concentration, I'd start to panic that I'd be interrupted before the task was complete. (And if you understand concentration, you realize that you just can't pick up an interrupted task where you left off.)

---

Where it came to a head was, late one Friday afternoon, I realized I needed to cherry-pick or revert something in Git. At the time, I was a bit of a novice to Git. I skimmed an article on how to do what I needed to do in Git, decided it would take me ~10 minutes, and that I'd leave when I was done.

No sooner did I make it through the first paragraph did my manager interrupt me with a question. I answered it, and tried to find where I was reading (in the article that explained what I was trying to do). Then the guy next to me interrupted me with a technical question. The two of them continued, ping-ponging each other, me being stuck trying to read a paragraph, until I was able to construct one single command.

Then my manager pulled me into his office. I saw that he was putting together a presentation, and I spent 10 minutes answering his questions.

I thought I was done and could complete my ~10 minute task, but no. After I constructed the 2nd Git command, my manager and the guy next to me resumed ping-ponging me with questions.

Finally there was a lull, and I started constructing the 3rd git command. My manager comes up behind me, and in a rather condescending tone, said to me: "What are you doing here? It's a long weekend, go home!"

I responded, "I'm just trying to complete a 10-minute task before I go home, but I keep getting interrupted!"

My manager didn't apologize. He grunted, and then ran out of the door, like a child caught making a mess, but not owning up to it.

---

This manager, BTW, is why laws in the linked article exist. He once "forgot" to tell me he wanted me to work on a Saturday. I had plans so I ignored his Saturday morning call. Thankfully he was fired (or quit, it was ambiguous) about a month or two later.

---

So, are you like my old manager, constantly interrupting someone, and not having the emotional intelligence to apologize or to pace yourself? Or, do you think before you interrupt, give people a chance to pause what they are doing, and pace yourself so you aren't monopolizing others' time?

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

#345

Post by lljk_kennedy »

ryan69howard wrote: post #241
nicbou wrote: post #165

This is already the case in Germany. It also applies to vacation and sick days. Above all, it's deeply ingrained in German culture, so that no one expects to reach you outside of your working hours. I help people settle in Germany, and it's one of the main cultural aspects I cover. The other is how normal it is to take sick days.

Result: complete loss of freedom to have flexible working hours and use the company office space

I don't think that's true. I'm in EU and I've allowed engineers to shift their working hours based on personal circumstances - like start remotely at 7am and finish at 3PM. I also encourage engineers to take the time they need for life stuff - kids school run, doctor, physio, sick aunt, whatever - because ultimately we measure the outcome of their work, and not the sum of hours worked.

For the office space - do you mean popping into the office at odd hours, like evenings or weekends? I'd probably be encouraging my engineers to talk to me about why they need to do it and not enjoy their non-working hours. If the work is too much, we solve for that. If they're going all in on something they love, I'll want to make sure they're not on a path to maybe burning-out.

Everything in context.

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

#346

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

warbeforepeace wrote: post #40
PlunderBunny wrote: post #24

Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags? There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature. I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.

I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.

I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.

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

#347

Post by juanani »

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.) ?

[dead]

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

#349

Post by zhengyi13 »

fergie wrote: post #244
steelframe wrote: post #39

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…

Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.

Normalize it now; take advantage of it later when there is some sort of benefit, however short-term/sighted it may be.

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

#350

Post by vitaflo »

mulmen wrote: post #321
runsWphotons wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience what are legitimate grounds to fire someone?

Theft and fraud.

If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.
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