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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

#351

Post by Flop7331 »

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.

There's also the call you get when the founder breaks something and blames the person who touched it before them.

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

#352

Post by Draiken »

ralferoo wrote: post #220
Draiken wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's always an explicit choice. I joined a company and despite asking many questions to try and avoid weird policies that could affect work-life balance, after joining I discovered they had certain types of code that had to be shipped outside of their client's business hours. Due to timezone differences, that meant extremely early or late hours for me. I like the company but absolutely hate this. Howeve…

> that meant extremely early or late hours for me. Especially if you had asked deliberate questions to establish work-life-balance and they'd withheld this, I personally wouldn't have just agreed to doing it without discussion of extra remuneration. Despite it clearly being a big deal for you, if you don't provide at least some pushback, it won't even be on their radar as an issue that's causing you pain. Maybe if it…

I pretty much agree with everything you said, but I still feel like your take is a bit too absolutist. If you're not afraid of losing your job, all of these are 100% accurate. But if you are, some of this advice can get you fired.

In my personal situation I did pretty much what you said. I brought it up and I'm hoping it will be resolved at some point. The reality is that these kinds of problems can almost always be solved, it just costs resources so companies de-prioritize it constantly.

I definitely agree that some push-back is necessary and a lot of companies have this culture of suffering silently that is very hard to change. It takes a lot of social capital and a fair amount of risk, depending on the type of people in charge. I know that I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't have a safety net of savings in case I lost my job.

People also forget that they are not alone. Our individualistic society promotes this kind of thinking that sometimes prevents solutions from being reached. As in your example, many folks were unhappy, but nobody wants to be the one that brings it up.

Overall I only really want to emphasize that it's really not always a choice. There's a very big power imbalance in employment relationships that can't be solved by individuals.

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

#353

Post by mulmen »

vitaflo wrote: post #350
mulmen wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theft and fraud.

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

Is it your assertion that power asymmetry, discrimination, and retaliation do not exist?

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

#354

Post by gamblor956 »

neom wrote: post #230
Akronymus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure you heard of red lobster going bankrupt because of endless shrimp. Well, that wasnt actually the case but once again private equity. They forced red lobster to sell off their land/buildings to a PE controlled entity. Which rented it back to them. Also forced them to go to a specific, PE controlled, fish seller. In fact, they got forced into starting the endless shrimp stuff because that seller had too much…

Darden group sold Red Lobster to GGC because it was massively underperforming in it's portfolio due to mismanagement through the 90s. GGC wasn't able to make much headway with it, and so it sold 25% to a vendor on the supply chain as part of debt restructuring and forgiveness, that allowed them to get some unit economics back into reality and the owner of the supply chain company took the rest of the position to cont…

That's a fair bit of revisionist history trying to make PE look like it's not the bad guy.

Red Lobster was flourishing in the 1990s; it was one of the most popular sit-down chains back then. There were lines around the block at most locations.

In 2013, Darden Restaurants decided to spin-off Red Lobster and Olive Garden by selling them to a PE firm which coveted the ability to exploit these profitable chains. (Average EPS was approximately $0.77/share, and Red Lobster remained the countries' most popular seafood chain until COVID.)

The sale to the PE firm GGC included a sale-leaseback of all of Red Lobster's real estate. The purpose of this was to fund the acquisition, since PE never puts its own money down; it funds acquisitions with the assets of the acquired company. Red Lobster's operating expenses jumped more than 50% overnight, as it now had to pay rent on locations it used to own.

Within 2 years, this PE-driven cash grab had Red Lobster on the verge of bankruptcy. Selling Red Lobster to its biggest supplier didn't fix things because the problem was that PE had the bright idea to ruin the company through the sale-leaseback arrangement.

PE was not just a convenient story, they are the cause for Red Lobster's demise.

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

#355

Post by Draiken »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #273
Draiken wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again the lack of worker rights come into play here. Companies should never be able to change an employee's working hours like that. I'm guessing in the US they can, because they have almost no worker's rights. Where I live this would be illegal. As for new opportunities, well, maybe? The theory would say these weird hour shifts would cost more and companies would have to think harder about their operations and…

Sure, but this is one of the things people are talking about when they worry a regulation might make companies less competitive. Online 24/7 is table stakes for any company that aspires to have a global presence - nobody in Europe or the US would buy Atlassian products if they were only guaranteed to be available during business hours in Sydney. If Australia successfully shifted the culture on this, Australian softwa…

So what? If only companies could have slaves again to make them more competitive!

I'm absolutely fine if companies "become less competitive" because they can't exploit their employees as much.

Following this train thought would paint China's 996 policy as a great idea.

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

#356

Post by Flop7331 »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #296
CalRobert wrote: post #281

Are people here treating emails like IM's? An email is inherently asynchronous. Why would I expect a response to an email before working hours? When did people start confusing them with synchronous communication?

Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday and send an email so I don’t forget. I have people on my team who view that as a “drop everything, cancel the wedding, pull the car over” level emergency. The issue is they ALL do this to themselves. They put work email on their phones, they have notifications enabled. Nobody asked them to do this, nobody asked them to read email all weekend. Even if I tell them “please…

That's what paper is for. Not email.

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

#357

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#358

Post by Linux-Fan »

mylies43 wrote: post #315
dathos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't mean to be pedantic, but that would already be interrupting someone right?

Eh I mean it would depend on how your doing it really, Im thinking its the difference between "hey sorry to interrupt, I have a question do you have a minute?" vs "hey {question}"

What became of "don't ask to ask" (https://dontasktoask.com/)? Although it may take some getting used to, I find it convincing that one shouldn't need to ask about whether it'd be OK to ask for short questions because the question for permissing is interrupting just as much as the actual question except that with the former it may be impossible to estimate how complex it is whereas it may be much easier to decide if the question is known.

For longer issues, could it make more sense to schedule an (online) meeting?

And on the receiving side of interruptions: Ocasionally it has helped me to just keep the "chat app" closed when I want to concentrate on something. If anyone has something urgent, they could always elevate to performing an old-style synchronous phone call, but interestingly this rarely happens with "text-chat" people :)

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

#359

Post by TremendousJudge »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #320
NeoTar wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the US - it's scary over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Our work culture is a strong part of why the US is so economically dominant. Reap what you sow “I work to live not live to work” crowd. Your destiny is to be further economically colonized by the “I live to work” crowd.

Or maybe it was all the military interventions that punished anybody who ever dared to question that domination

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

#360

Post by left-struck »

As an Aussie I’m glad this is has been codified in law but I’ve personally not had any issues with people expecting me to reply outside of work hours.

Then again I’ve always acted like I had this right anyway, if I were contacted outside of working hours I would just ignore it within reason. I always thought there hadn’t been much consequences but perhaps the consequence were respected boundaries…

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