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.
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I would like a law to say that oncall status is allowed but then you don’t have to go in otherwise for work. If you can be called any moment and have to respond to whatever crisis it should be like firemen and you can just relax and be ready.
or at least have clearly defined on-call pay on top of your usual wage/salary. I have had this at jobs in the past but it is not standardized at all.
Add to the list of things to keep in mind and ask about when job hunting.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.
That’s not really practical. For a lot of on-call roles, you need the experience of working on the equipment daily to know how to fix it.
Even if you alternated e.g. a week of on-call then a week of normal shifts, you end up reducing the amount of time you have that is completely non-work.
Firemen are absolutely not doing nothing until called out. There’s training, maintenance, cleaning, post-incident paperwork, and probably other duties.
alternating oncall is the norm and im not saying exactly like firemen. Im saying if your oncall you should not have to clock in like normal because they want you jumping out of bed at 3am if things are bad.
Usually these laws have somewhat neutered benefits though. Even though employees may have a right to ignore calls/texts/etc, the company can still decide to let you go (for “unrelated reasons”) or promote other people instead. If they don’t explicitly say they’re doing it as retaliation for refusing to communicate after hours, you can’t really hold them accountable.
I misread the headline as “the right to discontent,” which I think is also a good idea to codify, given the way people who speak out are often punished for legitimate complaints
and as consequence be fired
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What difference does it make that the email is sent after work hours or not? It’ll still be in their inbox the morning after.
Not trying to be facetious here, we have similar laws where I live, and employers respect that.
But all it changes is that you have to do a lot more in the 9 hours a day you’re on duty. The clients’ needs don’t just stop at 17.00. Either I voluntarily work through my lunches and evenings, or I get replaced by someone who does or who can somehow cram 14h of labor in 8h.
Uuuh, pretty sure you’re still allowed to read your work email off-hours, or get some shit done if you feel like it.
This just means you can’t be fired for, you know, having a life.
The difference is you can go to sleep without work constantly looming over you.
This also prevents a back and forth email chain that could last til the morning.
Sounds like maybe your work place is understaffed tbh. I recognise I’m saying this from a position of privilege, but that sounds like the company’s problem. Not yours.
Though as others have said, the law doesn’t prevent you from working overtime if you want to. I hope the pay is worth it at least.
We are understaffed. We’ve had an opening for my own job (well, not mine but the same position) for well over 2 years now without filling it.
We’re also all salaried, so no overtime…
