Anyone tired of answering emails and calls from their boss after work may soon be protected by law in California.
A bill has been introduced in California legislature that would give employees the “right to disconnect” from their jobs during nonworking hours.
Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco first introduced the bill, Assembly Bill 2751 in February, which would allow employees to disconnect from communications from their employer during nonworking hours.
If passed, California would be the first state to create a “right to disconnect” for employees. Similar laws have already been enacted in 13 countries, including Australia, Argentina, Belgium, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and Spain.
I have worked extra hours on salary, because on salary I’m being paid for the work, not the time. If I didn’t complete the work, I need to keep working. But that’s the fault of my own time management or inability to foresee the complexity of the task or estimate it’s workload properly.
Hourly gigs for me are always time constrained. You tell me my weekly shift before I sign and I tell you under what circumstances I’ll work OT (including rate, advanced notice, etc.) otherwise we have no deal.
I understand that not everyone is presented with the same choice or available opportunities, and my heart goes out to them.
The flaw with salary is that there is no defined amount of “work”.
It wont always be because you underestimated the complexity and mismanaged your time. If they asked you to complete a task and the only way to do it was to work 80 hours a week, sure that’s sometimes necessary. But what if they do that every week? Unless you were aware of those requirements during the hiring process and salary negotiation there’s nothing you can do. What if they pile on even more to your 80 hour week and you need to work the occasional 100 hour week?
There’s no way to regulate salary abuse, that’s why the system needs to be based on an average of hours.