Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email | Hacker News Reader

Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email

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123 pointsohjeez115 comments

The culture of after hours email needs to change from the top down. If they want an effective law, they should make the law say that you can't send email to anyone who is below you in the org during their off hours, or outside of "normal business hours" or something to that effect.

Employees were always allowed to ignore after work email, but their bosses most likely would not have promoted them vs someone who responds on weekends.

As a CEO, I try to set a good example by not sending email after hours. I try not to reply to emails after hours, to make sure everyone knows that it's ok to not work after hours. Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too.

The only way you'll fix this on a large scale is by forcing that top down approach.

That being said, I'm not a huge fan of even more regulations, but I do see why they're sometimes necessary.

I think a lot of this starts in school. In elementary school, kids are taught that it's okay (and even expected) for teachers to give them homework that they have to do in the evenings and on the weekends. In college, students take those habits to an extreme, as they send email and even text messages to professors late at night and on weekends, and a lot of professors respond. We shouldn't be surprised that they bring those habits into the workforce.

So, as a CEO, if you have an employee who wakes up early and wishes to put in a few hours early, you're OK with making that difficult by restricting the hours during which emails can be sent? What about the employee who likes to work for a while after putting his kids to bed?

I've had both kinds of employees, and I'm happy to facilitate their unusual work hours. The employee with young kids would often leave in the afternoon, and I was totally OK with that. His wife was a doctor and did not have flexible hours. He took the kids to soccer games. And he was the most awesome employee I’ve ever had the honor of managing.

To be fair, the parent did provide a solution to this problem by suggesting emails be saved in the drafts folder until regular work hours resume.

Also, there's the argument that by implicitly encouraging out of hours work you may unknowingly be creating an expectation to some observers.

How is it a solution to handicap both manager and unusual worker by prohibiting emails during their preferred work hours? The real problem is elsewhere. And yes, I actively manage the expectation of who should quickly respond to an email— frequently I will say it is not an emergency and can wait for their normal workday.

Reliable 9-5 hours are also very difficult for narcoleptics.

This is important to consider in matters of law, because it’s a disability and must be accommodated. E.g. if they’re in a managerial position.

Unless we’re suggesting narcoleptics may not email anyone outside of 9-5. Which leads to the situation you pointed out.

Ah, right, fair enough. I see your perspective now.

Nothing prevents you from composing an email outside of business hours, but not sending it.

In an actual emergency email is a terrible communication medium, thus no email should ever be of a time critical nature.

As a manager, answering emails in my off hours enables others to do useful work during their unusual hours. What you really want to attack is the expectation for employees to respond when they are not working— something that I do not expect.

Then what is the problem with sending it? The sender should know email is not for time sensitive things, it's for posterity and referencing. If you have an urgent matter, then call.

I accommodate them and reply and respond, and we set clear expectations that I may not respond in my off hours, and I don't expect them to respond in theirs.

It seems silly to apply a blanket law that "no work emails can be sent between X and Y hours".

If it's not a critical emergency, then it doesn't really matter if someone sends an email to another employee at 3AM because the recipient will just get to it whenever they come in to work the next day. There's plenty of instances where people may send emails to each outside of the standard 9AM-5PM working hours: traveling, in a different timezone, a shift-work schedule, the person is a night owl or very early riser and they like to work when they are most productive. I think people just need to accept and anticipate some lag time between communications when they send after hours email. Unless something is super important (which should be rare), there's really no need to expect someone to answer immediately, and the recipient doesn't need to feel compelled to answer immediately either. Even managers don't work 24 hours/day and sleep too. If they are being a hard-ass about always replying in a timely manner, then just email them at an inconvenient time for them to respond as a lesson.

Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too.

It’s hard to imagine sama saving emails in drafts solely for image rather than being responsive immediately.

What if a law forced him to?

Like I said, I'm not a fan of new regulations. I think each company should get to do their own thing. But I also see why workers need protection -- because when given the choice, many companies won't do the right thing unless it's also the cheapest thing.

It seems the underlying problem is that people who generally produce reasonable work productivity using email also likely are employed as salaried, overtime-exempt.

I don't think it is reasonable to craft a law saying you cannot communicate with your employees after hours. I do think it is reasonable to update the overtime exemption rules to allow for reasonable "time off" and that after-hour emails need to be compensated somehow, if the reading and responding to that email is required as part of your job. EDIT: And such regulation should also require disclosing to the employee that they are not required to read and respond to emails if they are not being so compensated.

I am also an executive, but definitely not to the level of your profile.

Such regulation has to be sufficiently unambiguous that companies don’t find loopholes around it.

There as rather simple technological solutions to achieve this company-wide:

Configure your SMTP server so that any email sent after 8pm is only sent to the other party at 7am; with a similar rule during weekend. [I am not sure how to perform this in practice with common SMTP servers, but there is not technological barrier here]

So employees can still "get work done" after hours, but they don't receive new tasks. In case of emergency, use the phone.

NYState could implement this in law. Emails sent at night to employees that are off-duty (i.e., not explicitly paid for night hours) should be blocked until the next morning. Much easier to implement than GDPR :)

Wouldn't that create it's own sort of tyranny in that it becomes about who can be a position to read and reply to email at 7AM?

I don't think so; (though I would set emails to be sent at 8am just to make sure :)

The whole issue comes from an implicit expectation that employees read their email after hours because (1) they are likely awake until 11pm-12pm and (2) they always carry their smartphones with email capabilities (3) the task has to be done before the next morning.

At 7am, employees are asleep so hopefully this implicit expectation of reading ones email will not transform into morning tyranny. Also, if the emails are received at 7am or 8am, the sender cannot expect the task to be completed before the morning but morning is already here. So managers will organize accordingly and stop feeling that it's OK to send tasks at 10pm to be completed by the morning.

I believe there's some requirements in Europe around this - companies need to be able to turn off access to corp email outside of work hours, to enforce that they're not incurring work. Is it France that does this? It's also why there's a quick settings toggle in Android to turn your managed corp profile on and off - there's an API that lets the MDM do it, so they provide similar functionality for the user.

> Under the proposed law, employers can send you whatever they want. They just can’t require you to read it or answer, and they can’t retaliate if you don’t.

If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. As written, you won't be fired for not reading email, but you will be fired when you appear much less productive to your employer than those who do read their emails outside of work.

On the other hand, as a tech worker, I've had good success with simply refusing to reply to emails or slack outside of work hours. The root of this problem is not that it's illegal to ask you to read your email outside of work, it's that folks love to feel important and aren't willing to set down their email. This law strikes me as excessive regulation that doesn't achieve a useful goal.

It seems great in theory but is absolutely impossible in practice.

If someone in SF sends an email at 4pm to a coworker in NY and it arrives at 7pm local, would that be a violation?

What about our India office emailing me during their normal work hours, but it's 9pm local?

Ok, overseas sites are exempt. What happens when my boss is visiting there (monthly occurrence) and sends me an email during local work hours? He's a US worker sending email out side of "standard business hours".

Automatic system emails? We have tons of reminders that get sent off overnight due to automated maintenance tasks. Do we have to spool those up until morning?

Many of our production sites run 3 shifts. What happens when a plant manager emails me from the start of his shift at midnight?

As soon as you start carving out all sorts of exemptions for these totally standard edge cases (and many more I could come up with if I spent more than 2 minutes on it), the whole law is pointless.

>If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours

This seems needlessly punitive for the same results. My boss works much later hours than me and I don't really see a point in forcing them to send me emails from the night before at 9AM when there'd be no penalty for me not responding to evening emails anyways

You can just have the server delay the email until morning.

I worked at a company which was like this. All emails were delayed until the hour to make sure you only got one interruption per hour. You could mark the email as “high importance” to get it through immediately, as were emails from external addresses.

I have that setup on evolution, when it's open it checks every 60 minutes for new mail, I just leave it running on Workspace 4 (email/communication) and forget about it.

If something requires responding to in <60 minutes..well that something probably requires a phonecall.

I think people forget that email is meant to be asynchronous.

> If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours.

I actually think it's better as-is. How would, for example, automated systems handle this? You'd have to reprogram everything to hold back e-mails until 9am or whatever when e-mail is already asynchronous. Something arriving in the middle of the night isn't a problem.

A middle ground solution: block client access to mail servers outside of office hours/outside of internal networks.

I don't have access to my work email outside of work (well technically I do have access, I just don't open evolution).

I do however have alerts@somecompany.co.uk setup on my phone and my monitoring emails/alerts go to that.

That's because I'm the only techie on staff so I choose to know if a backup fails/server falls over.

My boss is awesome about never emailing outside of work hours (I just looked, he's sent me 1 in 10mths if we assume out of work hours equals finish time plus 15 minutes) and that was a response to one I sent him at finish time.

It's complete freeing to not have to think about work email outside of work nor feel like I have to account for not doing it, I can focus on other stuff without having "I wonder if I need to respond to email".

The UK has relatively strong worker protections though (not as good as our friends on the continent but still decent).

> If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours.

It is curious they avoided doing the obvious with this, someone must have calculated the pushback from business interests would have blocked it. That said, you don't shift a culture overnight, and the style of work-culture in the US is more the problem than the laws (which will follow if/as the culture changes).

> If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours

1. Do automated mails count? For example, we've got several automated reports that run outside of work hours and email results to the people who care about them. We run them outside of work hours because they use a lot of CPU, RAM, and/or data from the databases, which could hit resource limits if we ran them during the day.

2. I'm not in the IT department but it helps with my work to know what issues IT has been dealing with, so I've subscribed to the mailing list that IT's monitoring system send alerts to when something goes wrong. The alerts can happen outside of my work hours. Would these count as my employer emailing me?

3. Suppose I'm a senior engineer, and I supervise a couple of junior engineers. I know that one of them has been having trouble coming up with a good solution to a particular problem, and I was not able to come up with anything either. Late one night at home, I see a link in an HN discussion to a paper that gives a great solution to that problem.

Would I not be allowed to use the "Email link..." feature in my browser to send a link to the paper to that junior engineer right then? Would I have to bookmark it, or mail it to myself, or something like that, and then during work hours mail it?

If the above emails would not be allowed, it would be a pain to have to enforce that by just making people and programs try to not send mail outside of work hours. Reports would have to know the work schedules of everyone they send to, and have a way to defer sending if the report is generated outside a given person's hours. Same for people who are personally sending mail.

So the way you'd probably have to do it is either in the SMTP server or the POP/IMAP server. The former would have to hold mail until the recipient's work hours, or the later would have to not allow it to be read outside of the person's work hours.

OK...that could be done. It will also need to know about exceptions to one's regular hours, such as vacations, which could be a pain if HR's systems are properly isolated from other company systems.

There should also probably be a white listing system, because some employees want to get out of hours email. For example, I want to know when things go wrong outside of work hours, because when that happens it (1) is usually something that I can ssh in and fix in a couple minutes, and (2) it is often something that if allowed to fester all night will disrupt numerous overnight activity like reports and re-billing subscription customers, which generates a whole lot of high priority work that I will have to deal with during my next work hours, and can turn what is normally a fairly relaxed job into multiple days (possibly requiring overtime--which does not generate extra pay because I am salaried) that are quite stressful.

I would gladly give up 5 minutes of watching TV or reading (which is what I am doing 99% of the time when something I can quickly fix goes wrong outside of work hours) to save several days of work hell.

Or, you could just get paid more to accept emails outside of normal working hours. Pager duty bonus / overtime, of some form.

The current problem is that companies are classifying employees as "exempt" which means they are not compensated for work outside of normal hours, but they are then expending folks to respond from mobile at all hours. Those two things are inherently in conflict.

Why did the workers allow this to happen? Why do we just simply give up more and more of our lives to give more profit to the corporation you work for? When are we going to stick up for our rights? It's not exactly a radical position.

We did this.

Agreed. Another example of where folks in knowledge economy jobs need should join/found unions.

Another thread where we can talk about unionizing tech workers but nothing will get done about it.

I mean, myself included. I wouldn't know where to even start with attempting to form some kind of country wide or global union effort.

https://aflcio.org/formaunion

A start!

Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slack outside work hours, nor any of the other always-on practices which have supposedly become universal. I don't take my work laptop home unless I plan to work from home; on the rare occasions I've had a work phone, I've left it on my desk when I go home. I keep imagining that someday somebody is going to take issue with this, and then we'll get to have an interesting conversation about expectations - but nobody in management, anywhere I've worked, has ever talked about such practices as though they are expected, given me any hassle for being unavailable outside work hours, nor - so far as I can tell - noticed at all that I have continued to divide my life into work time and not-work time.

I've been reading articles for years now where people talk about these sorts of expectations as though they have become universal, and yet I can't find any evidence that they actually exist in my own experience. It's confusing. Why do people believe this? Is this just not a tech industry thing, or perhaps is this just not a Seattle thing? Or is this something that has sort of collectively emerged in people's awareness without actually being real, and people just go along with it because they think everyone else is doing it, and they don't want to be the odd one out?

Not only are you doing the right thing, you are communicating the expectation from day one.

(poor) Managers generally treat you the way they do because you set the expectations.

It's like unplanned ad-hoc overtime, if you work lots of overtime to meet some arbitrary deadline you didn't set, you get a well done but the next time they set arbitrary deadline you are just expected to work overtime.

If instead you work your contracted hours and the deadline is missed you then force them to either a) deal with deadlines better or b) deal with you clearly about overtime.

I learnt that lesson painfully.

As my mum tried hammering into me and I never really got until I was a grown up - "People can only treat you the way you allow them to".

I personally find mobile connectedness a quality of life enhancement over the “old days.” Used to be that if I wasn’t by the phone or email, I effectively wasn’t working. Today, I answer some evening and weekend mails when it’s not too big an imposition to do so. In exchange I have a fair bit of flexibility about where I am and how available I am during regular hours. I realize many people have more rigid requirements but I much prefer my situation today than how I worked for much of my career when I had much more obvious separation between work and non-work.

Please tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's culture is very rare.

I am currently working at a little AI startup, which does have an unusually good culture, but I was talking about my overall experience across 20+ years in the West Coast tech industry, mostly in startups but also some larger places, including two of the Big 5. I have seen all kinds of cultural failures, certainly, but I've been watching out for this one, because I've been curious about how it was happening, so it surprises me that I haven't seen anyone in management doing anything to make it happen.

Not that rare, OP's description is exactly my work situation.

I go in at 9, leave at 5 on the dot (+/- 15 minutes), no one contacts me outside of work, only the MD even has my mobile number.

Boss actually gets annoyed if I work on stuff outside of work time.

I think the secret is to find a decent none-tech place to work, everyone else works 9/5 so there is no expectation on me not to.

I've work in the startup world in NYC for years and no one has ever complained that I don't check my emails outside of work hours — I do have Slack installed on my phone, and occasionally answer things outside of work hours, but not habitually, and no one's complained when I don't.

Corporate life! I'm a very staunch 9-5'er, the entire company basically shuts down at 5pm. We do have on-call rotations but outside of those hours, we don't have communication with each other. It's a boring, but quiet life.

This is a great issue to view through the lens of economist Arnold Kling's "3 axis model" (1) which says people tend to view issues through three separate lenses: oppressed vs oppressor (liberals), freedom vs coercion (libertarians) and civilization vs barbarism (conservatives).

It's pretty clear those in favor of the law view companies's as oppressing and exploiting their workers by making them read email after work to get ahead.

Those against would say it's a question of freedom. Companies are free to make outside of 9-5 email part of the job description, and get rid of people who don't measure up. Workers are free to find jobs where that's not expected.

Not sure the civ-barb axis really fits in that well here, but conservatives might view hard work and long hours as good traits we don't want to discourage, much less outlaw.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling...

I'm not familiar with Kling's model, but that seems like a terribly reductionist model. It scarcely sums up the range of ontological perspectives in America right now, let alone anywhere else in the world, and especially let alone outside of the present context.

Well, it is a model.

I think it's helpful in seeing where people are coming from on different issues. And note, it's not like all three axis are "valid" or "right" or have equal weight for every given issue.

For example, I think most people today (regardless of party or political affiliation) would tend to view the issue of segregation and Jim Crow laws in terms of the oppressed vs oppressor axis, which makes sense.

I skimmed through Kling's history and some of his writings and I'd wager that he doesn't exactly have a pre-eminent voice on politics.

Wish I understood the pro-business slant of libertarianism.

As companies become more and more powerful it seems reasonable to ask why it's the company's freedom that we protect rather than the individual's.

Surely one can see the company as governing our lives by making these rules, therefore restricting our freedom.

For one, if you limit your definition of freedom to "freedom to do things" and disregard "freedom from things", you end up being pro-organized-power, which is essentially pro-business.

What do you mean the companies making the rules? Do you mean laws or rules like "you have to check your email after 5 pm"?

You've framed the issue in a way that I think obscures a straightforward application of core libertarian principles.

Companies are just associations of people bound by various contracts, all freely entered into into.

So the libertarian belief in freedom of association and freedom of contract lead naturally to the support of any voluntarily formed organization including companies of all types, churches, non-profits, little leagues, partnerships, activist groups, and so on.

Au contraire, it could be the height of secular barbarism to force us to work around the clock like those San Francisco liberals, without time for appreciating a good book, raising families, or attending Mass.

EDIT: Or not, I'm just guessing...

Yes perhaps. I think the civilization vs barbarism axis is the one most most up in the air on this issue. Some conservatives might view the always plugged/everyone on their phone in culture as harmful and might be in favor of something like this. I know many religious Jewish people keep Shabbot, where they don't use tech for 25 hours.

But I also think you could make the argument that the oppressed-oppressor axis is coming through a bit in the "force us to work around the clock" part of your comment.

Meh, I hate getting after-work e-mail, but I think it's ludicrous to outlaw it. If people don't want to respond to it, then don't. If that impacts your job, and limits your career, either accept that, or find another job.

Personally, i've just left jobs that required me to respond to after-work or weekend e-mail, and found a better job.

It's hard to ignore when it also goes to your phone. Also when the company _expect_ a reply.

I have had HR routinely email me between 9 and 11 pm on Sunday nights as a deliberate strategy to make me stressed/uncomfortable with the workplace. Some people are trash and use technology as a weapon.

I used to work in strategy consulting (Bain and company), so i am very familiar with this type of pressure. I stayed with that for enough of a time that I've learned my lesson

If you read my comment, one option I gave was simply leaving, which is what I do in this case. After leaving Bain, if a company does this, I quit, and tell HR the reason why. There are no second chances.

It's easy to ignore when you turn off notifications for your work emails on your phone.

It gets a lot harder to have this attitude when you have a family to support. But meh to that.

I do have a family to support; my wife stays home full-time too, and I'm the only one who works. We meticulously save up money so I can quit my job if I no longer like it. My wife and I prioritize convenience and a relaxed home environment over all other factors. We are prepared to live on /very/ little, and if I find in the future that I really don't like software engineering, I have been working on learning to build fine furniture (And have been somewhat successful!), so that remains an option for supplementing income.

After working several jobs I really hated, we've decided to never become beholden to a company again. People pay you money if you do work that helps them. If you get this, then making money is straightforwards enough, and you don't need a whole lot to get by.

The only place where this falls apart is medical costs. However, in my opinion, the fact that you can go bankrupt from medical costs is more an indictment of America's healthcare system and lack of universal health insurance, than it is a valid critique of my philosophy.

Markets need regulations. Otherwise children stay in mines and the Irish need not apply.

Also, based on the fact that you're on HN, I'm going to assume that you're lucky enough to work in a field that currently has a surplus of career options that pay a living wage. For lots of people that's not the case. These types of laws are meant to prevent exploitation of labor in the 21st century where "the workplace" has been completely changed. It's not perfect, it leaves plenty of ways for people to continue to be exploited, but it helps stem the bleeding and pushes the culture a bit in the right way.

Your view of "just go to the job tree and pick a new job" is cute but completely out of touch.

I agree that markets need regulations, I just fail to see the comparison between after-work e-mail and children in mines. I think it's quite ludicrous to compare the two.

Firstly, there is little data on how many companies require this sort of employee. My guess is that the few companies that do require it for good reason (would you really be okay with not allowing hospitals to page doctors after hours?). More likely, employees feel pressured when there is little pressure being exerted by the company itself. I've worked in strategy consulting which is well known for how it takes over your life. Most of my colleagues felt a compulsion to respond immediately that I simply never felt. If you listened to how they put it, you'd think God himself were breathing down their neck. This is completely self-imposed. The alternative is to respond when ready and before the deadline, but not feel pressure.

> Your view of "just go to the job tree and pick a new job" is cute but completely out of touch.

If your choice is between not having a job or responding to e-mail, then legislation isn't the way out. If your job requires this kind of attentiveness, and you have no other choices, making it illegal for your company to require this does not make your life better. It simply makes your job go away. We are seeing this right now with the rise of automation due to the increase in minimum wage.

The government needs to focus on giving employees skills so that they too have something to negotiate with. The fact is that an unskilled employee has no bargaining power and is little more than a slave. The government's strategy should be two-fold: (1) invest heavily in making sure every employee has a skill that can be bargained with, and (2) stop subsidizing businesses.

You could argue that viewing legislation like this as a sort of magic wand, "just pass a law that says nothing bad can happen to you if you don't check email outside of work and that'll fix everything" is even cuter, more out of touch.

Oh now who in their right mind said ANYTHING like that anywhere? I've made a LOT of posts on this thread and have very specifically not said that whatsoever because that's stupid. In fact I'll go ahead and quote myself and say "It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction".

So yes, I agree with you. Thinking this is wizardry instead of a small step in the right direction would be very out of touch with reality.

I'm not clear on why I should be prohibited from accepting more pay in exchange for being more available.

http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=34...

Here's the legislation. It excludes "overtime", so you would be able to do this. The law is just creating requirement that you opt-in to extended availability, not forcing you to always opt-out.

Busybodies gonna busybody.

I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue?

Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.

It's a law being proposed in the US. It's a problem here. Just out of curiosity, where are you from?

The proposed law doesn't prohibit you from sending emails. It prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who don't respond to the emails. It doesn't prohibit employees from responding to emails. It also allows your job to define when your "normal work hours" are, so if you work at 2 AM and that's when your office is open, you can expect people there and responding

It's super great that your work experience does not intrude upon your life. For many people in the US it does, and they feel like they cannot do anything except accept this intrusion. This law allows them to, like you, not touch their work emails when they're not at work.

Originally Finland, currently working in a multinational based in Germany. Same experiences in both countries, I've never felt any "soft" pressure of the kind described in this thread that'd call for such legislation.

On call hours are controlled by legislation though, at least in Finland. Compensation for being on call isn't just "included in your regular salary"; employers are required to pay 50% (IIRC) on top of that just for the fact that you're able to work (read: sober and not innawoods) during a certain defined time period, and if you're actually called in, salary for the actual overtime hours worked. Obviously this gets pretty expensive for employers though so they tend to make optimal use of their on call people, but at least the rules are pretty clear.

And that seems to be the direction legislation like this would be pushing employers towards. The problem is, as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, that many people don't appreciate the idea that working 24/7/365 isn't what most people want. If you do, that's cool, do you, but forcing that culture on people makes problems which makes market regulations.

This is great and all, but NY is still an at-will employment state, right? Sure they wouldn't be able to fire you for _this_ specifically, but they wouldn't have to fish long to catch some other reason to let you go if they want to.

I was under the impression the point of at will employment is that you don't need a reason to fire someone. That's why most companies don't give reasons, or if they do they're generic and meaningless: i.e. "this isn't a good fit... culture wise."

As a practical matter, though, you probably have to come up with some reason to prevent the employee filling in the blank with some sort of protected-class discrimination.

"Culture fit" does sound nice and generic for that purpose.

Technically, you don't. Push comes to shove, employee would have to prove discrimination, which is near impossible. But if the company has a decent amount of assets, some enterprising lawyer can decide to be a thorn and say well the company might settle to make legal costs go away. Which is where personal improvement plans come in, so that if you are threatened with a discrimination lawsuit, the accuser knows they're not going to get anywhere so they won't waste your time.

Even in "at will" states (which is 49/50 US states, or 50/50 depending on how you interpret Montana's approach), there are some prohibitions on what companies can do. And the "we didn't fire this employee for (prohibited reason), we fired them for something completely unrelated" thing is not novel. State labor departments are extremely familiar with it.

Sure, but disputes cost time and money. You don't need novelty to have the deeper pockets jam things up in arb/litigation.

Sorry, I'm pretty cynical when it comes to employees rights in the US. I have no direct personal experience that causes me to be, but I somehow ended up this way :)

A lot depends on how active your state labor department is.

There certainly are states where they just won't care. There are other states where they'll actually do something for you.

This is a terrible piece of legislation. Supposedly emergencies are exempt, but what if you have a remote team and need someone to check in once or twice during the evening? There are a lot of situations in multi-office / distributed teams where a response from one-time zone is the only bottleneck for moving forward.

The penalties are harsh and arbitrary: A fixed $250 fee paid to the employee plus a $1,000 civil fine for each violation.

Government workers are notably excluded from the bill. City Councilman Rafael Espinal Jr. got the idea for his bill from France, which isn't exactly a great model for a city that wants to attract business.

Government workers being excluded from this bill is classic. Reminds me of the unions in LA who pushing a $15 per hour minimum wage, then wanted to be exempt when it got passed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...

You always had the right to ignore after-work email, it was never the law that allowed this, only social pressure.

The law isn't going to change the perception that if I answer this email, it will get me further along in my career.

Even with this law, the person you are competing with for that promotion will still probably answer after-work email, so you have to as well.

I wonder what the "quality" of after work email is vs. work hours email... or communication that happens as an alternative to email such as talking to people.

I often noticed that email I receive after hours gets noticeably more vague, sometimes unexpectedly demanding, less thought out, and at times lazy after hours. Like people are putting in the effort to send, but not think about it completely.

Often I'd call someone the next morning and whatever they emailed me was out the window by that time and we'd be on to something else.

I really, really hope this gets adopted in some form or other across the country.

Just about every service provider I talk to talks about enabling employees to work from everywhere, as a positive aspect, without any awareness of imposition.

I'm elated we are looking to claw some of our own time me back. To have some definition between work life and home life. No more blurriness.

Of course carve outs for vital 24x7 ops, with appropriate compensation, depending on characteristics.

This always on call on duty nonsense is dehumanizing.

Jobs like that exist and you're welcome to take one. I prefer to be always available; please don't try to outlaw it.

Literally nobody is doing that. Go read that description. Employers can still email you whenever they want, they just can't take any action against you if you don't reply.

So it's super great that you want to be at your job's beck and call for whatever your reasons, but I fail to see why slowing the creep of work into my off-hours is bad?

You misinterpret. The point is not to be available out of the kindness of one's heart, the point is to create value doing that and be compensated accordingly (and hence, to be fireable or not as well compensated otherwise).

You may volunteer, if you like but there should be no expectation or negative repercussions for people who do not engage in this behavior and managers should be advised against any implicit bias against non conformists.

I would like to do the work and get paid for it. If you don't want a job like that, don't take one.

The reasonable defense of sorts of restrictions is that workers are stuck in some sort of collective action problem; none of them want to work overtime, but they can't coordinate. But that argument is dead in the water if it can't account for different preferences.

Opinions like this enable the continual abuse of the American workforce.

I disagree. Opinions like this one allow people who want to make more money, impress employers and get noticed because of it, and therefore excel to achieve those goals.

The unintended consequence of a rule like this will be that employers will move to limit liability by introducing technical barriers like are being discussed elsewhere on this thread. Therefore people who want to work more and be compensated for it will be technically prohibited from doing so.

The sacrifices we make for a civilized society. Apologies for not being able to maximize your earnings potential to prevent workplace abuse.

Easy political win considering how many workers are being exploited compared to “high achievers”.

If you have a 24x7 ops why not have shifts instead ?

Totally agree. That would be ideal.

Anctedotally I’ve seen a few friends take roles where they have essentially absorbed shift work. They are supporting multiple time zones and don’t really have a defined work schedule they are sort of always working. It appeared to take a tole on them based on thier physical appearance.

I'm curious about one specific part of TFA, namely "Workers who are on call 24 hours a day get to disconnect only on their days off and vacations."

I know tech workers are already in an "interesting" position with mostly unpaid-overtime being the expectation. I don't however understand where the legality of that classification breaks down, and whether we would stand to benefit from the above, or if we should expect more employees to be simply reclassified. (On a broader tangent, with the various minimum wage and worker protection bumps certain states have taken over the last few years, I'd be very curious if anyone came across a good post-mortem of how those actually panned out with respect to employment rates and %s of employees in various classes; I know it's pretty well accepted that we've seen a significant growth in contracting/"gig" work (also exempt from protections per TFA) but I've been wanting for an evaluation as to the level of correlation with micro-events as opposed to broad trends of cost-cutting.)

I'm pretty sure physicians would fall under the "on call 24 hours a day" criterion, too, whether or not they're explicitly "on call."

Many such companies can well afford to take on more employees. They just don't want to.

So, you have to draw a legislative line in the sand. Redefine the "level playing field" -- and its boundaries -- within which they compete.

In order to give people their lives back.

We see enormous displays of wealth, at the high end of compensation. It doesn't all have to go to the individuals who find ways to squeeze their employees ever harder. Make them spend some of it on more employees.

P.S. Yeah, employees aren't simply "fungible". But there needs to be some balance against "always on" employment. Also, at the lower end of the workforce, against last-minute varying and fragmented scheduling -- keeping employees essentially at your beck and call while paying them only for the hours you actually call them in. Destroying family time and planning, sleep schedules, etc.

This might be better phrased as “maximum work hours per day”, where every work-related activity counts toward those hours.

Some jobs, unfortunately, naturally have weird hours (because the company has worldwide offices, is in a special industry or whatever). You wouldn’t, for instance, get very far responding to disasters if you were not in a position to even find out about them most of the time.

The problem isn’t so much the “after-work” activity but what “work” means. If my job required responses to issues at weird hours, I would expect to reduce hours at the not-weird times. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways though, otherwise workers never have any reasonable way to truly disconnect, which is stress.

I work in a product development environment. We have a worldwide network of suppliers. At the beginning of this year our employer stopped reimbursing our monthly cell phone bill. When asked if we still should respond to emails form our phone both durring and outside of work hours we were reminded that although it is our choice to reply after work hours our bonus is contingent upon launching product on a timely schedule. Personally I enjoy being connected at all times as it maintains better relationships with engineers across the globe but ever since this decision was made I'm much more selective about what emails I reply to.

This is something that really irks me. Of your employer expects you to use a phone in your work, he should damn well supply you with a phone and pay the subscription.

> Everyone who doesn’t check their work email “just one more time” before turning in for the night, please raise your hand.

Totally off-topic, but I see this sort of statement a lot and it's odd to me. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s at the latest. How many people that fall under the workaholic stereotype being portrayed by this kind of article are still deliberately "checking their email" in 2018? Seems to me that anyone who's this attentive to emails pretty much knows the minute they receive one because they get a push notification from either their smartphone or the inbox browser tab they have open.

For a developer there shouldn't normally be a need to check email that often (if good processes are in place), but if you're doing sales, support, fundraising, etc., then seeing and responding to incoming emails quickly can be very important. It's crazy how much difference in conversion rate you can see by responding to a lead in 5 minutes vs. even a few hours, or how much more forgiving customers are of problems when you respond very quickly.

I'm "hourly attentive" to email, or maybe "convenience attentive" if I'm waiting in line or something. For me, turning on notifications for email would eliminate the distinction between email and chat. I understand some people use it that way, but I expect lots of folks keep the distinction.

Right, but you presumably aren't one of the stereotypical anxious busybodies the article is appealing to with the sentence I quoted. Anyone like that wouldn't disable the on-by-default push notifications, I'd assume. What am I missing?

For people who sleep at work to be on call I hear it is usual to pay them a lower than usual rate (40% ish) for every hour of availability which (depending on the time) will change into a [much] higher than usual rate if they have to do anything. It seems fine to be paid 40% for the other 16 hours and 2 times 24 in the weekend. At 40% these 128 hours would be 99.2 hours. I would jump out of bed at 3 am to do whatever you want. (well almost)

So, what to use for asynchronous messages if I’m finishing up something and want my colleague (up or down) to see when they start work in the morning?

A couple of months ago, I just started leaving my work laptop and phone in my locker at work. There is absolutely no reason for my employer to contact me at home after hours, and they know it. I'll stay late if I need to, but all work happens at the office, not at home.

I'll only make an exception and work from home if I need to go to the dentist or something that day.

This is silly. If passed, your boss may not be able to explicitly punish you for not responding to after-hours email, but he can certainly make decisions about promotions and discretionary bonuses based on whether you responded to after-hours emails, without saying why. All this does is encourage people to be devious.

Sideways related old thread, just in case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118

How about they make a law which will have real effects vs. just lip service -- ban unpaid overtime.

Time to buffer your emails.

A libertarian view:

I see jobs very simply as offer and demand.

In tech for example, there is such a huge demand for engineers that you are can get away with a lot of things. For example a lot of my friends work at big tech companies and consciously decide to work 9 to 5 and never do any work (email or other) outside those hours.

Some will decide to do it and as dictated by the law of offer and demand, they will be rewarded slightly more than the ones that don't.

I see nothing wrong with that, and it is a prioritization choice and tradeoff that everyone needs to do.

Now, on the other side, there will be jobs that have very little demand and a lot of offers, which will make people compete for the lowest wage and the highest availability. There must be some sort of regulation here, but I don't think that a blanket regulation against emails outside of working hours is a good idea.

The problem is that the power balance is shifted hard towards the employers. Were it not for regulations, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and people would still apply for the jobs. It would be a race to the bottom, as every employer would follow suit.

YAS! 100% behind things like this. There is no reason to expect employees to perform their normal jobs outside of normal work hours. If you want them working, pay them overtime.

Most people who make salaries don't have to be paid overtime.

Right. And with this law, most people who make salaries won't have to respond to work outside of normal hours. So it seems like a rather short jump to the conclusion that if you wanted someone to be available via text/email at all hours...you'd need to set up some sort of compensation for their time. Maybe this isn't the specific definition of overtime, but I fail to see how that's not basically overtime

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