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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

“Right to disconnect” suggests employees get to choose whether or not they may not be contacted outside “work hours” (whatever that means in the information economy or creative economy or finance or medicine or…)

Those who exclaim they may not be contacted outside of “work hours” will soon find others who are willing to work longer and harder and will be the ones who get the raises and promotions. The result of competition and ambition.

You cannot stop ambition. You cannot tell people they cannot complete.

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This same argument can be used about all workers’ rights but as an Australian I am extremely glad for the rights we have and am happy to see them extended. This law isn’t going to make me stop taking calls from my boss after 5pm, but I am glad that it will be there as a fallback if I am ever in a position where my manager is abusing that privilege.

Your work hours are defined in your contract that you sign when you accept a role, no matter the industry.

> This law isn’t going to make me stop...

It should. I'd expect that unreasonable after-hours work is already not an option (which is why I think this law is stupid, I'm pretty sure we're just adding administrative red tape to ban something that is already illegal - it isn't reasonable to expect someone to work when they aren't being paid). In practice you're planning on tolerating an illegal activity in an attempt to get an advantage over your workmates.

People are a bit weird about the law. You aren't supposed to use one comment to simultaneously advocate legally banning a practice and suggest you will be engaging in it.

I take my bosses calls after work because I like her, and she is very busy and I know it is a convenient time for her.

She wouldn’t mind if I ignored her call after hours because I was at the pub :)

So if we talk about standards, "my boss can call me out of hours when it is convenient for them and I will make a spot judgement about my availability" appears to be the standard you work to. Which is cool. A little looser than my preferred standard but hey; everyone is a little different. But the law now seems to be that this is illegal and you can launch some sort of action against your company for engaging in this activity. With, for a brief moment, criminal penalties for the the people involved. That seems to me like either a stupid law or a poorly thought out one.

And I'd encourage your boss not to do that if I were you. It was already bad practice and there isn't any point in her taking legal risks.

I believe the new legislation says, if GP were to be punished for not being available for such a call, that'd be illegal and they could launch some sort of action. This seems totally compatible with GP's policy; boss can call them outside hours, GP can respond, if GP doesn't respond there's no consequences.

That's the point of the new legislation. If the business discriminates against you because you're not willing to work outside of your scheduled hours, the business faces penalties.

It's the same principle as not requiring unpaid overtime to get ahead etc. The government sets a regulatory framework, and businesses have to compete within the rules.

Information economy is a vacuous, cynical term that some employer group likely invented to justify stripping away at the working conditions for the majority of people.

Nobody is saying that you can't be contacted outside of standard 9-5 work hours. Only that employees and employers need to mutually agree on it. Because unpaid overtime is completely unacceptable and is no way a prerequisite for ambition.

It's about setting boundaries, and making sure you aren't penalized when someone doesn't understand boundaries.

You don't need to be contacted after hours for bullshit; and using the excuse of "ambition" shows why these laws need to exist: Some managers don't understand healthy boundaries.

It takes a specific kind of person to replace employees with ones who work longer and harder. Normal and actually good employers care about stability.

I assure you, the asshole wont give raises to people who already do whatever they say. I mean why? What would be the point to give people money for no reason?

I have this picture in my head of a programmer failing to be productive because they are constantly interrupted by their boss. Then, in the middle of the night he calls to ask something stupid that could have waited till the morning. The next morning they sit at their desk all zoned out, trying to gather the monumental will needed to start the same task for the 15th time. They gaze at the wall for 30 min and the phone rings again. Now he wants to know when it will be finished. They want to tell him to leave them the fuck alone but in stead they say 1-2 weeks knowing the task should take about a day. They hang up the phone and casually browse the web looking for a new job. Oh? open floor plan, nope, this one is not for me either... The boss is like, I'm going to replace this guy with someone better!, fluffs his pillow and turns over.

>Those who exclaim they may not be contacted outside of “work hours” will soon find others who are willing to work longer and harder and will be the ones who get the raises and promotions.

That's not how things work in the real world.

This legislation does not prevent additional work, but it heavily and aggressively penalises employers who insist upon it. Notably these sorts of things can be prosecuted in review if it is found that there's an unrealistic expectation that employees must work outside of hours or find themselves disadvantaged.

> but it heavily and aggressively penalises employers who insist upon it.

Criminal penalties were included due to a clerical error that copypasta'd clauses from elsewhere.

The opposition refused to allow an ammendment that removed those "aggressive criminal penalties" that have upset you.

Blame Dutton for playing politics and knowingly choosing to keep an obvious and acknowledged mistake in play for the next election cycle rather than fix it here and now.

Dutton greatly overstates his competence to be able to do that, of course. This comes on the back of their ridiculously stupid flailing about over Stage-3 tax cuts (promising to reverse tax cuts that benefited 85% of income earners much more than their own plan, which was to mostly just give a big tax cut to the top 15% of income earners, then working out that was a dumb strategy and ending up looking like idiots walking that back and then voting for the Government's bill).

The inclusion of criminal penalties wasn't accidental, but the wording of what can cause those penalties was not well defined, and that is what the fuss is about.

Australia has unions

...For some industries.

Which voldemort is looking to minimise.

Many experts are saying it will be coming to most industries especially white collar.

Because employers will likely seek to replace large swathes of employees e.g. developers, lawyers, accountants with AI when it reaches that point. And collective bargaining will be the only mechanism for employees to fight back.

And this isn't hyperbole because we saw with the Hollywood writer's strike that studios were getting ready for this future today.

I'm an engineer building a company solo. I've used AI (GPT-4 specifically) to do all sorts of roles on an ad-hoc basis. Marketer, Data Scientist, a bit of Product Management, Graphic Designer (I used Stable Diffusion to create my logo). I also use it to do code review in the absence of other engineers to do this.

Given that i'm bootstrapping with no investors as yet, AI has filled all of these gaps to the point where I have a good base to keep building on. All without hiring a single employee. Also i'm based in Australia.

So, later this year, GPT-5 is out, a little bit smarter than GPT-4, and a year later, GPT-6, yet a bit smarter. And every potential and actual employer will want to do what you just described. What do you think is going to happen?

I think a little bit could be an understatement. Based on current progress it's quite possible it could be progress by leaps and bounds each year.

It’s scary. The political climate is rough already, rich/poor divide has been steadily growing since WW2. Boomers are retiring, stressing social security programs. And now we got the impending almost total unemployment…

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