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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

> The right to disconnect refers to a worker’s right to be able to disengage from work and refrain from engaging in work-related electronic communications, such as emails or other messages, during non-work hours.[1]

What does that even mean? Is the EU also going to come out with the "Right to breathe" and the "Right to go to the bathroom when you need to"?

I'm really frustrated with how the term "right" has been watered down. Rights used to be innate freedoms of the utmost importance, something worth dying for. Now it's just shorthand for some benefit the government provides, or something that the government allows you to do (often with lots of stipulations). Rights are no longer something innate to all humans, they are something that the government gives to you when it wants.

[1]https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/indust...

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It's called "Worker's Rights" after all:

https://globalnaps.org/issue/workers-rights/

I'd put that under "Safe and healthy working conditions" and "reasonable limitation of working hours".

> Is the EU also going to come out with the "Right to breathe" and the "Right to go to the bathroom when you need to"?

Yes, when it becomes a practically accepted norm to violate that right. Is your point that government is overstepping the bounds, or that this type of right does not deserve protection? Or is it just about the semantics and definition of the word "right"?

> Rights are no longer something innate to all humans, they are something that the government gives to you when it wants.

I always thought that the humanity creates communities, countries and their governments to protect those rights, among other things.

Worker's rights _are_ rights of the utmost importance.

I'm curious as to how your perspective on these worker's rights and EU regulations generally has arisen ... is your primary experience of employment one based on working in the United States (which is ranked lower than a large number of European countries in the 2019 ITUC Global Rights)?

It means that if your contract is for 37.5 hours per week, you don't need to do email and be available on im outside of your daily 7.5 work hours. Being on call needs to be negotiated separately.

Rights aren't a thing until done by law.

Otherwise you are at mercy of company policy or whims of your employer.

From a US Constitutional perspective, rights are inherent, and the Bill of Rights protects citizens from laws that infringe on those rights. Rights are not given by the government via laws, they are inherent protections from invasive laws set by government.

That concept is called 'natural rights', and it wasn't invented by the US constitution. That document is just one of the more notable formal recognitions of natural rights in modern times.

Natural and human rights exist too, and they are often a bar by which we judge legal rights.

The right to not work all the time is most definitely an innate freedom of utmost importance, sitting directly on a line throughout history in the fight for worker's rights.

“The right to breathe” is actually a very important right and has led to environmental regulations. It’s correlated to “the right to not be harmed by others”.

There are laws about the number of toilets minimum temps ion the work place in the UK as well as breaks.

I assume the USA has building regs on toilets etc in work places

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