French workers win legal right to avoid checking work email out-of-hours
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Now, you obviously can't prevent these people from doing that without disabling corporate accounts and door access between 5pm-9am. So there will be people doing that, to appear in better light than others. The practice just spreads to less ambitious employees as well, and then to less motivated ones.
While I support that you should be able to cut off work after the day is done and switch to your free time I don't see how you could regulate something like that.
To even try you would have to ban giving promotions to people who work some extra for their employer (remove the incentive to do extra) or give some sort of employment protection to people who do disconnect (pretty much like you can't fire an employee who's pregnant or on parental leave because such is collectively agreed to be worth some serious shitstorm).
In the end, the only enforcement I can think of is that each person needs to make that decision themselves. If they value their free time and life outside work then they must equally deprioritise work in their life, to the extent where they might be fired because they will disconnect from work outside of the hours agreed, and then find an employer who shares the same values. If good employees do that, employers will have to realise that in order to retain or get good employees they must give in and let the employees enjoy their free time in peace. Now, the only problem is that there is always someone more hungry for money than you, willing to sacrifice more than you. The remaining question is that which people are the majority.
I'm guilty of sometimes answering emails outside of hours, but it's more related to the desire to get stuff done rather than how it will impact my career.
It's the same thing with doing work after hours. If it's something I find interesting and I've got nothing else going on I'll gladly take a peek.
The same is true in the US.
The only difference is that California considers tech workers to be exempt. But other industries and in other states, this still applies.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4aacfcafa43a42539d0e56e44ce93...
You can still check your emails and get stuff done. But stuff will not accumulate after 8pm, you will not be bothered by other employees working at night, until early morning.
This configuration of the smtp server can be billed $5/employee/month which is a bargain to make sure your employees (1) have a sane life after 8pm and (2) can still get stuff done if they want to!
Also, a mail can have multiple recipients, each in a different timezone, but only one sender.
I had a project at one large company, where a daily conference call was scheduled at 8AM Pacific Time, my local zone, so that the guy in France could attend at a reasonable hour. There were attendees in various other "Western" locations. The time zones ranged from -8 to +1.
Nowadays I see this happening with virtual companies, who rent offices all over the place and barely own anything. When I have dealt with such, no one has been expected to be operating more than 8-10 hours at a time. Expectations of email response are patiently kept in accord with the time zones of the recipients.
I think my previous points are reasonable assumptions most people who have and would not require proof. If you believe otherwise you should provide a source.
It is. I assume most businesses are small businesses that keep to working hours in their local time zone. It would be a reasonable assumption.
> In the US at least, 17% of US employment (27 million) is for the Fortune 500 (2015) - definitely spanning multiple time zones.
So? Fortune 500 companies have web portals and databases with details on each employee. Why can't the email server check to see if the email should be sent now or later?
Another reason one might want to check email outside of work is to make work easier the next day. If something starts to go wrong at 9 PM, and I see an email alert from a monitoring system, I might be able to ssh in and fix the problem in a few minutes. If I wait until the next morning, the failure could be affecting other systems and I might be facing a whole day of annoying and tedious tracing the results throughout the system and fixing bad database items. Yuck.
I'd much rather hit "pause" on the cable box, or step to a reasonably safe spot and cast invisibility on myself in EverQuest, or stick a bookmark at my place in what I'm reading, at 9 PM and take care of it and then get back to my TV show/game/book and then have a nice day at work the next day where I can work on coding new things, than give myself a really crappy work day in order to save a few minutes of slight inconvenience at home.
Personal time where I can be interrupted by an emergency isn't personal time to me.
Additional work should not help getting promotions/a raise, but only a one-time bonus (proportional to the overtime/achievement): - if the person stops overtime after that, (s)he will continue to enjoy the rise forever. - working more does not help by itself to go to the next level (being more productive, getting new skills allowing to transition to another role) - (it's even more toxic when stacked ranking is put it place: those who work "normal" hours will almost never get a raise/promotion).
Also if there is ever a lawsuit for whatever, the company has a right to seize your phone if there is company content on it.
You definitely can still limit children's TV watching, but they're not dumb, and it takes more effort now that they know you could play an episode of their favorite show on Netflix any time you please than when your hands were tied by the broadcast schedule. "Sorry, you'll have to wait for next Saturday" was an easier sell when it was impossible for you to do anything about it (well, tape, but if you hadn't already recorded it there was nothing that could be done after the fact).
I wiped and reset my phone recently, and apparently IBM has upped the security requirements to sign into Slack since I first set it up: now I can't sign in on my phone for an undisclosed reason. (Probably because its rooted, I know that's why I'm not allowed to have my work email on my phone.)
It's been kind of nice, honestly.
[0]http://support.mail-wise.com/knowledgebase/articles/391797-w...
Giving your company (or anyone) total access to your personal phone is insane. Your phone, with access to your email, is effectively a master key to your life. Through it, they have the ability to do almost anything to you (reset your bank password and take all your money, etc).
If you hunt around enough though you can find the parameters needed to use IMAP.
On the contrary you can disable other rules - like enforcement of PIN (if you know how) if you have a rooted phone.
[0]https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/index.html
I'm fine with not doing so as I don't want bigco's email on my phone, it's super spammy. It's more of a todo list than actual communications, forever base lining permissions.
* POP/IMAP/webmail/etc. Obviously the incomming SMTP server is publicly accessible, but that doesn't help me.
Even if that's true, the solution should not be to actively penalize young workers, which this might do.
Of course, there is going to be downsides, but it's too easy speak about paternalistic government and not to mention the obvious conflict of interest between labour and business.
Warning: this only applies to regular office workers, not management or freelancers.
Are you getting paid for checking company emails after working hours? You are not, right? How is offering your limited, private time FOR FREE to a company worth it? Is your private life SO boring, you need to do something that many of us do not even like doing during office hours? Are you afraid to be the only one in your team to bring some sanity? Do you think your boss is going to respect you less if you put clear boundaries between work and private life? Do you think you might lose your job if you don't check emails at all hours? Might be time to start looking for a new job...
I know, this post is a bit on the rough side, but I'm just trying to challenge the status quo for some people. I have personally met a lot of good, nice people who would think that they MUST do stuff for the company for free, after hours. Without any good reason. Actually, I had this one colleague who would check emails even very late at night, and if there was someone reporting a bug would jump in and try to fix it. And guess what? Countless times his code was really bad and it caused many more issues than it intended to solve in the first place.
If management isn't also not reading mail/doing work after office hours than the whole thing falls apart.
Basically if they business isn't onboard with the idea of not working after hours, it won't happen and those that try to force it risk being replaced with people that 'fit the company culture.'
Not really. The thing about email is that the boss can send one out after hours, and it will still be there in the morning.
Huh? The only difference between a manager and a non-manager is that the former manages others.
The problems occur when routine work is treated as high priority/time sensitive. But I'm not sold that legislating this is the best solution. Even the example given of somebody fixing bugs overnight w/ bad solutions - that is something management should have addressed. Unless a really critical system has crashed as a result, there is no good reason to fix it then and mgt. should make that clear.
Explain this to me. Nothing "comes with the job". Your job is your job and if you are working, say, 40 hours a week, it's more or less 8 hours a day. After 8 hours working, you go home and enjoy YOUR time. If companies want people to do company work while they are awake, they should basically double payrolls and pay for 16 hours, not just 8. Actually, not even in that case should it be OK.
People are people and need to have their life and leisure time. If they don't have it, they start to feel overworked, stressed, depressed. In the end, it's not a net positive for the company either.
THIS is precisely the attitude that leads some abusive bosses to believe that it's OK to expect people to sacrifice their free time. This should be a major offense, and should not be tolerated AT ALL in my opinion.
> The consequence of enforcing your attitude by law is that small companies will never be able to expand to compete with big businesses. Say your website goes down at an inopportune time for a market in another time zone. Sorry, there's no one that can fix it because you can't have someone handling emergencies that 'come with the job' off hours on a staff of five. Now you've lost a major market.
Emergencies are different beasts. In my opinion, being on call should be paid extra. Same as happens with emergency services. How is your service when the site goes down different than a medical urgency? (besides the obvious fact that most probably, nobody will die if your website goes down at night, but you get the idea).
I was talking regular work. I know (and have experienced this personally) that some companies make look every day as if it could be doomsday if you relax.
Of course, lines get blurry, as in life. But some situations are so obvious, it does not need to find edge cases.
Restated: salaried positions by definition include an expectation that your work won't always be confined to 9-5 hours.
That's a curiously un-European way to look at things. In every private company I've worked for, if they wanted more than my agreed salaried hours they either paid overtime or gave me TOIL (Time Off In Lieu). If they wanted me to be on call, they paid me an on-call rate.
If it was the other way around - you suddenly needed to leave early every day for a week - how do you think your employer would react?
Every employer I've had (all in the US) would be perfectly fine with that.
Yes. Or rather, what happens at work is so interesting that it usually beats refreshing reddit for the 5th time in 10min while in the train.
... in response to what the poster actually wrote: "work is _so interesting_"
If you're rewriting what the poster wrote into words of opposite meaning, it doesn't seem like you're engaging in real discussion.
When the poster writes a response, one can either honestly try to understand his position, and then ask followup questions that are relevant to what he actually wrote.
It seems like you didn't do that. Instead, you distorted his choice to read work email as "boring" and therefore, your followup questions (side projects? hobby?) had the tone of "lecturing" about his habit.
In reading all of your replies to everyone, the gap in your worldview is that some non-managers like their work such that reading email outside of office hours is a natural response. However, that doesn't mean everyone should do it. For workers that feel strongly that reading email after-hours is wrong, telling others not to do so isn't going to work.
If some people have different viewpoint about after-hours email, are you interested in thoughtful discussion about it? Or do you prefer to lecture people regardless of what they say?
Don't tell people what to do. You don't understand another person's situation or values.
I voluntarily pay attention to work matters on my own time in a reasonable and controlled way. I like my work and at times (not always) it's as fun and rewarding as whatever hobby I might spend time on instead.
I've also been rewarded in various ways, both tangible and intangible, by demonstrating above-average "discretionary" attention to work. Totally within the bounds of keeping a sane balance between home and work life. And absent of pressure to do it in order to keep my job.
I can understand why people who disagree feel strongly that no one else should put in extra time to get ahead either. Sometimes the rewards are zero sum. But there's a time and place for serious investment in a job or company, and other times it's only about a paycheck. Make sure you choose one or the other consciously, but don't pretend there's one right answer.
In reality it has never made a difference for me. I can quickly scan my email inbox and if anything is urgent and important it's known that you should either call or speak to me in person.
Once again, demagoguery wins over human rights. And people wonder why Europe's economic growth rate has steadily stagnated over the last forty years. The answer is social (demagogic) democracy.
What they don't have a right to do is deny employers the right to offer any terms they want. You're promoting authoritarian infringements on the right of consenting adults to engage in voluntary interactions.
If you were to invade Myanmar today, and impose a social democratic government that bans child labour, the result would be an increase in mortality.
Child labour only became unnecessary as a result of economic development increasing the average level of wealth in society.
Going back to the article, it's telling that you're trying to justify the authoritarian prohibition by comparing adults to children. Your ideology sees ordinary people as effectively children, and the state as their parent.
You're free to frame this argument in terms of individual rights or "economic competitiveness" or state paternalism. Unfortunately it amounts to little more than economic handwaving. At worst it's a disingenuous ploy to undermine the interests of the labour class, deluding workers into thinking you're giving them economic rights and freedoms ("you should be able to choose when you work!") when really you're just justifying your extraction of an even bigger share of their labour.
The common labourer has no economic power. The state, the firm, and (to a diminishing extent) unions do. I hate paternalistic states (and unions) as much as you do, but when you place no limit on firms' ability to extract labour from their workers, you end up in twisted situations where people are being paid sub-livable wages and expected to be on call 24 hours. Not because it's an economic "inevitability" (child labour inevitable? You seriously believe that?), but because it's the most amenable socioeconomic arrangement for the capitalist class.
I recommend you study a bit of economics.
Start with Adam Smith:
>It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Then read this:
This isn't free market dogma. This is what 400 years+ of economic history shows us, and what any economist would confirm.
Wages and benefits improve as the wealth of society increases, and wealth increases as a part of the normal course of history, particularly when market institutions are strongly in place. Wage growth slowed as a result of the institution of economic-growth-destroying socialist laws and programs in the US and Europe.
And putting all of this aside, you have no moral right to violate another person's right to freely contract to increase your own wages. So even if economies didn't work as they do, such authoritarian prohibitions would be unjustiable.
That is what all the statistical evidence suggests.
Anecdotally, I've spent a fair bit of time in the developing world, and to me at least, it's obvious that the root source of the difference in working and living conditions between the developing world and the developed world is the comparatively lower levels of capital (tools, equipment, machinery, social capital, skills, knowledge) in the developing world.
And policing violations of other's right to their person or property, in prosecuting murder, and managing public property, in instituting and enforcing traffic rules, is absolutely a proper role for the government.
The role of government is not to avoid unnecessary pain. Government is a collectively formed institution given a set of powers to provide goods we cannot provide for ourselves individually. There is no objective reason why people, acting through their government, have a right to violate the rights of others, when clearly people have no such right when acting in the individual capacity. They do not have a right to make racist motives or hiring practices illegal, because it hurts their feelings.
And trivializing the harm done by racist hiring practices is disingenuous. Its not just 'hurting feelings'; its marginalizing citizens en masse.
Many practices, like slavery, that we now consider deeply immoral, were in place for thousands of years before the majority came to believe in their immorality. The fact that something has been done throughout history neither tells us it is moral, nor that it is immoral.
I think if you strip away the ideology (modern liberalism), the labels (government) and the appeals to convention ("this has been done for hundreds of years"), and look at the practice you are endorsing for what it is, it is clear that it is immoral.
You're saying that you and I have a right to threaten John with violence, because John won't hire Rhonda due to her race.
That is what all government mandates are based on: violence, and you want to use them to make actions that in no way violate another party's rights subject to violently enforced punishment, if they are based on a particular set of values, or refuse to help a particular party we want helped.
But most government most place most of the time its just social pressure. Fines for parking in the wrong place. A visit from a social worker. Lines painted on the highway.
Jumping from those to violence is disingenuous.
Something being the law doesn't negate its qualities. The law is enforced through the threat of violence. Ignoring this fact is euphemizing what your political ideology is actually endorsing. The fact that laws are enforced through the threat of violence is extremely important, because it tells us why a humane society does not use the law to punish consensual activity or noncompliance with morally illegitimate demands (e.g. the demand by income tax law on the population to surrender its private property and privacy rights).
And then there is those long term contractors that are hourly but basically on a fixed number of hours per week who still are 'encouraged' to do what little extra is needed to get this project done so their contract can be renewed for the next one once they've shown they can be counted on.
Whether or not they are paid hourly, as long as they are not classified as exempt, they are entitled to overtime pay. (Tech workers are classified as exempt in California, which is indeed a problem and IMHO a mistake, but that's a much smaller issue)
> And then there is those long term contractors that are hourly but basically on a fixed number of hours per week...
Well, that's a bad way to write a contract, but even so, that's a totally different situation because they're not even an employee. And the French law referenced in the original article wouldn't apply in that situation either.
You really need to make it clear to the people you work with that this is an issue of integrity. You want to work with people who have and understand integrity.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13291386 and marked it off-topic.
Many companies these days have branches in all parts of the world. 1) Out of hours for oneself could be perfectly office hours for the customer. 2) you might be the only person knowing this part of the product or tech, and all is required could be just a quick yes/no answer.
I am not advocating for either side, but please -- the world is more complex than it seems.
See my pt 2.
> if my boss wants me 24 hour service he/she should pay me for it...
I think your boss wants result from you, not any random metrics like 24 h/on the job. If you consider that you are underpaid for the result you have been delivering -- have you demanded a raise?
In my experience, the evidence indicates this is not the case. They may say they want results, but results are really hard to measure, so they end up actually wanting hours and often various other easy-to-measure metrics.
Think about it - were you in the managers shoes in this position, you're forcing someone who is the only holder of critical knowledge of your business to work extra without compensation, and against his will - don't you think there's a pretty big risk there?
Regarding metrics, I think any manager who has even a tiny bit of empathy for his employees would realize that "time spent at work" (or more accurately - time spent not at work) is an incredibly critical metric for his employees' well being, and any discussion should look at what's important for the business as well as the employee.
EDIT: fixed grammar
I didn't require answering to insomniac customers at 3am, though I have actually received calls at 3am due to an emergency in Asia (which in my work may be an actual emergency with lives endangered).
Indeed, the world is a bit more complex than some people think.
> On the other hand, they're perfectly comfortable with me telling them, "I'll be in a bit late today because last night was rough". Give and take.
I'm comfortable waking up at 3am in the morning if it's needed, and my clients are comfortable with me not always being in a seat from 9 to 6. Flexibility on both ends, give and take. Plus, they are always appreciative of any effort, in or out of normal work hours. I love the clients I work with. We're a team.
There should never be a reason to wake someone up at 3am to fix a "we're losing 5 million dollars an hour" website problem.
Then you can pay me for the answer. This doesn't make it impossible to provide timely customer service, just makes it so that you don't get to transfer the cost of doing so onto your employees.
But what if the employer does pay you correctly for your results? So correctly that you are actually willing to do it?
If you don't think that's true, try fulfilling your duties through a marathon session on Monday one week and don't come in the rest of the week. Even employers who claim to be "results-driven" will view that as evidence of you being under-utilized and increase your workload.
Presumably you are in hi-tech industry -- software, hardware etc? These employees have never been weak part of the equation (not even in France ;-), since I can remember, as far back as 1997. One could always slam the door, cross the street and get a better job.
> i always thought that configure the work email in your phone or home computer is apart from stupid a security and privacy risk.
Agree! But what if the employer have given you the mobile phone you use, and pays the subscription fee?
Or a worse one. Otherwise companies would be offering infinite benefits and salary and reject zero candidates.
Look up salaries in France compared to norther Europe or US.