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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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!

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