It's now officially illegal in Ontario for your boss to bug you after-hours | Hacker News Reader

It's now officially illegal in Ontario for your boss to bug you after-hours

blogto.com

59 pointscolinprince34 comments

The part about banning non-compete agreements is promising, but I would suggest that anyone in Ontario check very carefully before assuming this applies to them. Ontario has previously exempted large classes of people from certain employment protections, including "IT professionals".

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

Honestly, if your jurisdiction doesn't have the same non-compete laws as in California, that's a red flag.

Super well done.

Ban the use of non-compete agreements that prevent people from exploring other work opportunities in order to make it easier for workers to advance in their careers.

This should be the norm everywhere.

Even before this law, non-competes in Ontario were mostly an intimidation tactic.

I'm not entirely sure if this change does anything, since it appears that employers can still put in a non-compete agreement (which is void, but still works as an intimidation tactic).

The only thing here that I can see the benefit of, is that the news coverage of non-competes being void, will make more employees aware that they're void.

Read the actual law guys, it's nothing like that headline.

https://www.ola.org/sites/default/files/node-files/bill/docu...

I can see on page 3:

"[..] defined to mean not engaging in work-related communications [..] so as to be free from the performance of work."

The intention is there, are you saying it does not say it clearly?

is a pager from an automated system that detect the server are in fire part of « engaging in communication « ?

It says they need to have a policy. It doesn't say what the policy has to be, what the punishments are for breaching it, what exceptions could be allowed, who signs off on the policy etc. It also only applies for larger organisations. That's a long way from "it's illegal for your company to contact you out of hours".

Unintended consequences in 3... 2... 1...

In general, legislation is a terrible solution where simple personal responsibility, team culture, and "voting with your feet" work best.

In before Ontario has a net outflow of devs to places that don't micromanage what kinds of messages I can send to my employees and at what hour. Some of the closest bonds I've built with other engineers happened at 5AM on a Monday morning because we need to debug a server failure live in prod. All hands on deck! Raise the hacker flag and pass out the RedBull! Tallyho!

If you need engineers to respond to server issues at 5am you can and should be paying them to be on call, and then paying them on top of that when an incident occurs. I don't think anything in this law (which doesn't seem to even resemble the headline of this article tbh) would prevent that.

100 % agree

Should be extra pay just for the stress of being on call and not allowed to go make plan for your weekend (movie, camping …)

And some extra cash for each call you received

Legislation here is great and I welcome it.

> Some of the closest bonds I've built with other engineers happened at 5AM on a Monday morning because we need to debug a server failure live in prod. All hands on deck! Raise the hacker flag and pass out the RedBull!

See, this is exactly the toxic work culture this is preventing. I don't want to be working at 5AM on a monday morning, and I don't want coworkers to do so either, creating cultural pressure I do.

There shouldn't be "personal responsibility" when it comes to workers rights and (self-)exploitation.

What in the world is "self-exploitation"? More woke college student hooey?

Self-exploitation is an ideological control mechanism of the bourgeoisie in modern capitalism, where, instead of outright coercion, more insidious mechanisms are used to extract surplus value from labor.

By activating the worker's will to generate value and "empowering" them to partake in "hustle culture", they create a system in which they can seize surplus value while the subject isn't even aware of their own exploitation. (your comments are a prime example :))

See also the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony for more details on the mechanisms at play here.

Your explanation lost me at "Gramscian."

Sorry to hear that - it's not that hard to understand if you put your mind to it! Glad to hear you made it pretty far though!

If you can't avoid hiding behind a po-mo smoke screen of gurus like Gramsci/Deleuze/Guattari/Adorno/whoever, maybe you don't have a very clear or even meaningful claim.

Not everything that goes above your head is a smoke screen :-)

We aren't against social justice here.

> In general, legislation is a terrible solution where simple personal responsibility, team culture, and "voting with your feet" work best.

The entirety of the labor rights movements was won by over by unionization, strikes, threats of violence and legal activism. If "voting with your feet" was the solution we'd still be working 12-hour days. For a more current example, we'd have on-calls being paid at least time-and-a-half for every hour you're available.

That's great bro. That's how I had my first outbreak of an autoimmune disease and years of insomnia and PTSD whenever my phone vibrated from years of being on-call from completely preventable causes.

Wishful thinking every employer would let employees "vote with your feet".

Not everyone wants to build relationships with colleagues especially as your son/daughter awaits you to finish work standing by your desk with their coloring pencils or if your a single mom weaning your child. I'll take the legislation for sure.

Did you mean wean or nurse? Children naturally wean themselves around two or three years old.

Can an employee opt-out? I don't mind when my boss contacts me after hours. I'm happy to jump on a serious issue in a timely manner, when needed. My boss has never abused this willingness and if he did I'd be happy to have a conversation with him about it myself. I don't need anybody else to intervene on my behalf.

> Can an employee opt-out?

I am curious to know this for a different reason: if opt-out is possible, it will become a standard term in all employment contracts from now on, so this law might as well not exist. We know all too well from the cookie law that a law with opt-out turns completely useless before the ink is even dry.

I agree, I don't mind getting contacted after hours

You can opt out in the same way that everyone opts out of legal protections: by doing whatever you want and not being a snitch about it. It works great when everyone's buddy-buddy and there's trust. It also gives you great leverage when things go south.

I hope not. Then "opting out" (wink wink) will become the standard, and employers won't hire you unless you "opt out".

Your employer can opt-out by paying you.

Other employees probably don't want you to be contacted after hours, as it sets the expectation that it's okay to contact them too.

This is to protect them, not you.

as a backend engineer i am on call 24/7 .. How do they define « after hour »

Awesome! I can't wait when it will be officially illegal to work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com