Australian workers will now have the legal “right to disconnect” from work, as per a rule which came into effect on Monday. This means they can now ignore their bosses’ emails, phone calls, and texts outside of work hours.
It entitles employees to ignore out-of-hours attempts by employers to contact them unless this refusal is deemed to become “unreasonable.”
“We want to make sure that just as people don’t get paid 24 hours a day, they don’t have to work for 24 hours a day. It’s a mental health issue, frankly, as well, for people to be able to disconnect from their work and connect with their family and their life,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in an interview with national broadcaster ABC.
In Europe this is the case, but most bosses ignore this. They’ll say you have to be logged in or on the road in a certain time when on call and pressure you for it, but nothing about this will be in mail or in the labor agreement. You can basically ignore a call outside of normal business hours for several hours and when the boss complains you ask where this time limit is written down and he’ll walk away. If there is a time limit it’s a fully paid working hour for each hour on call.