Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours
Is
your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you've left
for home?
Australian
employees can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a
new "right to disconnect" law designed to curb the creep of work
emails and calls into personal lives.
The
new rule, which came into force on Monday, means employees, in most cases,
cannot be punished for refusing to read or respond to contacts from their
employers outside work hours.
Supporters
say the law gives workers the confidence to stand up against the steady
invasion of their personal lives by work emails, texts and calls, a trend that
has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the division between home
and work.
"Before
we had digital technology there was no encroachment, people would go home at
the end of a shift and there would be no contact until they returned the
following day," said John Hopkins, an associate professor at Swinburne
University of Technology.
"Now,
globally it’s the norm to have emails, SMS, phone calls outside those hours,
even when on holiday."
Australians
worked on average 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, according to a
survey last year by the Australia
Institute, which estimated the monetary value of the labour at A$130 billion
($88 billion).
The
changes add Australia to a group of roughly two dozen countries, mostly in
Europe and Latin America, which have similar laws.
Pioneer
France introduced the rules in 2017 and a year later fined pest control firm
Rentokil Initial 60,000 euros ($66,700) for requiring an employee to always
have his phone on.
Rachel
Abdelnour, who works in advertising, said the changes would help her disconnect
in an industry where clients often have different working hours.
"I
think it's actually really important that we have laws like this," she
told Reuters. "We spend so much of our time connected to our phones,
connected to our emails all day, and I think that it's really hard to switch
off as it is."
REFUSALS
MUST BE REASONABLE
To
cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows
employers to contact their workers, who can only refuse to respond where it is
reasonable to do so.
Determining
whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia's industrial umpire,
the Fair Work Commission (FWC), which must take into account an employee's
role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.
It
has the power to issue a cease and desist order and, failing that, levy fines
of up A$19,000 for an employee or up to A$94,000 for a company.
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.
"The
laws came literally and figuratively out of left field, were introduced with
minimal consultation about their practical effect and have left little time for
employers to prepare," the group said on Thursday.
The
president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Michele O'Neil said the
caveat built into the law meant it won't interfere with reasonable requests.
Instead, it will stop workers paying the price for poor planning by management,
she said.
She
cited an unidentified worker who finished a shift at midnight, only to be
texted four hours later and told to be back at work by 6 a.m.
"It's
so easy to make contact, common sense doesn’t get applied anymore," she
said.
"We
think this will cause bosses to pause and think about whether they really need
to send that text or that email."
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