Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
...than it does for you, which means there's an opportunity for someone to expend resources verifying and characterizing the claimed difference.
IMO, the only reasonable argument one could take, is that roughly believes hackers should be curious, and that if you want to treat humans with the respect they deserve as individuals, you should default to trying to believe what they say, listening when they try to communicate, and avoid ignoring what they're trying to communicate just so you can interject something unrelated about yourself.
I not only agree, but I'm glad someone took a moment to encourage treating others with respect.
Explaining how to update your understanding feels like something that shouldn't need explaining, so I have no idea how well it'll turn out, but I'll give it a shot.
In the case of the original objection, the problem was instead of being willing to believe the other person commenting is being honest, and that they do actually have a manager so detached from reality, and what reasonable and fair behavior would be, that their manager expects them to respond to messages 24/7. Remember, we're assuming this person actually exists in real life. Either you believe this person exists, or you don't, or you actively refuse to believe that this person exists. For the above case, the argument was never you should pretend your boss behaves like that. The recommendation is that you assume the person you're talking to is not lying to you, until you have specific concrete evidence otherwise. If you don't have concrete evidence they are lying, you should believe them, and you should believe that [this person] thinks their boss expects them to be available 24/7.
This is an update to your world view. If you thought no boss could ever behave like this, your world view should now include there are plenty of people who believe their boss behaves like that. You don't have to discard your entire world view to say
shit, some people really do have a bully on a power trip instead of a manager who wants to help them be successful.
hell, you don't even have to believe that, you could just as easily update your worldview to include, wow, there are a lot more people who are afraid to say no than I thought there were. The point isn't to replace whatever idea you had, the point was always, listen to people and try to understand their point of reference, and try to use the things they have learned about life to help yourself, and if you're not incompetent, hopefully help them too. But seriously if you're still so stuck on how you just can not listen to them without completely discarding what you know today, pretend they aren't lying, but they're just engaging in some role play. In this magical make believe world, there is this evil bossman, how can we defeat him?!
If this idea, of picking up new information in the shape of an opinions from another person with eyes and the ability to form coherent sentences and complaints, is really so foreign to you... perhaps you do need to completely discard your current model for understanding, and replace it with a diff model for understanding that can be modified and updated in place without needing to start over.
You don't need to accept their reality as true, to believe them and want to help. Saying "that's not how my boss acts" is an attempt at a refutation, and a denial of their expression. You can doubt that their boss is really that bad, but still be willing to see if you are able to help, instead of rejecting them with, sorry I already believe something different and to even consider if you're describing something that actually happens, I'm going to assert my experience is exactly what it's like for everyone.
If someone shares a story of a terrible interview experience on HN (which happens often) and I claim that bad interviews don’t exist because I’ve never experienced one, do we now expect people to litigate the fact that bad interviews do in fact exist? Or do we just downvote my terrible take and move on?
Becoming harder and harder by the day as the internet and society change, with the bots and the growing inequality and all.
I'm not sure about that, but to your higher point, HN hasn't taken pride in it's nominative determinism nature, nor does it appear to be a desired trait from the majority. But the continued enshittifcation aside, "it doesn't happen to me" is still a useful observation. That shouldn't be read as a refutation, because I already agree with your point. The intent of most of the comments your objecting to, likely does come from a narcissistic compulsion, to turn the topic to something about them.
But I could easily say "it doesn't happen to me" while (poorly) trying to convey a message of encouragement towards self-confidence, and self-worth. Rather, it doesn't happen to me, because I haven't been gaslit into the shared and common delusion that: if you get fired, it'll because of something you did, and not because your manager felt like it. "Employee didn't answer the call/message at 10pm" is the reason they'll invent to fire you after they've decided to fire you. It won't be the root cause. You can just turn your messages off, and nothing bad will happen because you didn't respond.
Are there dysfunctional companies where something like that will get you fired? Absolutely! I would have hoped that existing wrongful termination laws would have already prevented this kinda thing, (if they don't that's a much larger problem) but I have no objections to making this an explicit law to compel the behavior of the sub-human group that would rather mistreat their coworkers. But given that within places that behave like this, this law would only fix a small subset of the pervasive human rights abuses inflicted during non-working hours. I feel like something more expansive should be done to protect those people from clearly abusive behavior.
I still expect that the vast majority of the people that would benefit from this, could simply just turn their phone off, and no one would notice... because while it's a problem, that does happen to some people, one that needs to be fixed! It doesn't happen to me, and probably doesn't really happen to you (most people) either.
>Maybe I just have abnormal leverage
while the other opens with
>I'm curious
The top two top-level comments are responding to this trend, so I assume it is or was present, but I'm not seeing it. I do wish people would reply to the comments they find objectionable instead of doing these meta comments subtweeting them because I find I run into this issue often lately here (pot-kettle objection noted and accurate).
It's telling if someone can't actually find a comment to reply to in order to address whatever meta issue they're concerned about.
The first is that, by the standards of the world at large, this is a relatively homogeneous community. It is still a wildly diverse community, that's one of the things that makes it valuable, but in the same way that psychology has a WEIRD[1] problem, Hacker News is homogeneous - we're more likely, as a community, to not include a viewpoint sampled at random from humanity than to include it.
That points towards the second, which is that there's a tendency within this group where, when a news article comes up or a law is proposed or an academic study is posted in which some factor of human life is discussed ("X% of people experience food scarcity", "Y state bill would bar employers from Z", "B in C people are genetic carriers for Q"), to discuss it from our own viewpoint - "My cousin who experienced food scarcity was a klepto," "my employer tried to call me off hours and I didn't answer," "my cousin died from Q." This is both intensely human and often fairly useless here, because of point one above. I am a straight white male who grew up in a house whose affluence varied but never dropped below sustenance who's worked in tech my entire life. I have parts of myself that are genuinely different, where I feel I can genuinely provide new information to the group (I've had heart surgery, for instance), but by and large, if I share my experience with this group, it's to commiserate with colleagues. I am part of this community; things which seem strange to me are more likely than not to be outside this broader community's lived experiences as well.
So my critique here, broadly, is that we as a professed group of hackers - as a group of people who've self-labeled as curious - have a bad tendency to read things that indicate an experience of life that we haven't or don't have (in this case, that someone could be unable to deny their employer after-hours comms) and focus on our own experiences, rather than recognizing that we're being provided an opportunity to expand our understanding of the possible states of the world or the possibilities of being for people in this world.
It's understandable and deeply human that we would do so - we're social creatures, and community building is in part an act of expressing and validating commonality - but for a group whose self-identity is curiosity, to respond to evidence of someone else's lived experience by reiterating our own lived experience when that experience is likely to be within that of the broader group present is... well, it just takes up space.
(By the way, this is the point in the post where I'm going to nod towards my neurodivergent brethren: when I say below "we," if the point I'm making doesn't apply to you, understand that if you were in a room with you, me, and 10 wolves, and I said "there's too many wolves in this room," and you responded "well I'm not a wolf," I would agree with you and that wouldn't change my point.)
We are, broadly, a privileged group. Broadly, the people on this forum have remarkable market power. Broadly, the people on this forum are wealthy. Broadly, the people on this forum are educated. If, when you comment on a thread, you are expressing a part of your lived experience that broadly coincides with the lived experience of the median person on this forum, _you are not adding to the discussion._ You're not expanding the discussion. You're not helping people learn. You're not, yourself, learning. If you read something on this forum and think, "weird, that's not how I experience the world," think to yourself "Am I adding to this discussion by saying that?"
I find the internet full of panic and fear and negativity these days and it overstates how pervasive a thing is.
Example: I travel to Disney World sometimes. There's a recent hubub about transportation and the blame is all on "OMG THE INFLUENCERS ARE EVERYWHERE".
In those situations it's interesting how many people will spread those stories about influencers saturating the park / causing problems and yet ... most every user who replies "I've never seen one at the park".
Everyone's experience is valid IMO. Everyone gets to express their lived experience.
There used to be a lot of "abusive start up demands massive hours" talk on HN. I actually think people expressing how it isn't that way everywhere / doesn't have to be that way is VERY helpful. Folks in those situations now know that maybe they have options.
The idea that if we're discussing a problem that only people with that problem may share their experience is absurd at face value.
"I'm insured!"
"Open-source software projects are being spammed with LLM generated PRs. Contributions are becoming more restricted".
"I have a repo that isn't being spammed!"
Sometimes sharing a somewhat related experience is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and also completely uninteresting. It does not matter that somehow their "experience is valid".
If people's opinions or thoughts don't fit a narrative you want, a forum likely isn't the place to find it.
Everyone gets to share, there's no rules here about not sharing / having a different experience than others.
I have no idea why you're making a comparison to a TV show; nothing that was described was anything akin to that. I just made examples out of insufferable and clueless forum comments, that very clearly detract from discussion more than they contribute to it.
I don't think you should assume that describing meaningless and unrelated anecdotes as "uninteresting" is equivalent to users calling for a forum ban, which is seemingly what you're doing when you point to forum rules when encountering a critique.
I disagree that this is a fair interpretation of the original objection. But assuming it is a possible interpretation, "that doesn't happen to me" isn't sharing an experience, it's sharing the lack of an experience.
Sure, yes, everyone does get to share, on a public forum, expecting otherwise is dumb. On that, 100% with you!
And yet, I feel like there's an important difference between sharing how your favorite color is blue, after someone said they like red the best, and sharing how you're not being mistreated, when someone is asking for help to stop someone from mistreating them.
You see how one is everyone sharing together, and the other appears to minimize the mistreatment of someone else?
Think someone says i'm thirsty all the time because there's little clean water available, what's available is expensive but it could be better if we did so-and-so.
and someone replies I'm not thirsty.
Which one is right?
One person offers insight and the other reacts. Such a reaction is inherently on a different plane than a original statement, because you chose to make it about yourself, in the presence of another persons slice of their reality.
To give a crass example:
A: I had a shitty day, they took my dog and killed it
B: Well, *my* dog is still alive
I know, some people have the reflexive urge to make every situation about themselves, but I think you should instead be aware that (1) your own experience is not necessarily representative of the broader reality and (2) even if it is may distract from the topic being discussed.
Don't get me wrong, everybodies lived experience is in fact valid. And yet that doesn't mean it is appropriate to share it at all times. If your friend tells you their newborn died during childbirth telling them: "Well mine didn't" would be actively abusive behavior. If someone tells you an intimate story about how being poor affected them as a child, there are certain ways to share your experience of how your parents always bought you everything you wanted that productively add to the topic and others that distract from it.
Always remember that everybody just sharing their experience is a different thing from you reacting on some others experience. What may be a fun anecdote for you, may be a life-defining experience for others.
Aside from these examples anecdotal evidence can be destructive if it ignores that the plural of anecdotes is not data.
Saying this doesn't happen to you in threads like this just signifies that you don't care, you basically downplay other people's bad experiences because well, it doesn't concern you.
You may not be affected now but you never know when it will happen to you or to someone close to you, and you would be glad that such law exists protecting you.
If it were national, sure. As is, companies will see Michigan as a bad place to hire people, which was probably not the goal.
Tech sales can be just as bad. This is more understandable, but if customers didn't work outside of work hours, sales folks wouldn't need to either (since speed outside of work would no longer be an advantage).
Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
The article isn't clear how exactly this is intended to work. I think no surprise hours that aren't recognized in the terms of employment makes sense. But also I think I should be able to agree to being available if I am willing to be. Remote Michigan tech workers already have enough trouble as tech companies insist on returning to office.
If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly employee. Not a salary one. You might be called a salary employee. But no, you’re working as an hourly employee.
If companies expect you to be on call, that’s great. Pay an on call hourly rate. Problem solved. But you can’t just take a salary employee, treat them like they work at McDonald’s and then pay a base bi weekly salary. That’s not okay IMO.
It was ALWAYS a way to get massive unpaid overtime extracted upon threat of firing. And overtime for workers was inexcusable, no matter what. Got a rush? Too fucking bad, clock out.
These days professionally, I agreed to 40h/week. That's what they get. If there's a real outage or un-manufactured crisis, then I'll stick around. But its comp time for the week.
I don't work for free for capitalists. If they want more labor, they can pay for more.
What's your opinion on [cuck licensing](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708655)?
I'm staunchly for AGPL3, and harsh and strong enforcement actions against violators. You know, what the companies would do to us. Tit for tat.
Which is basically the situation you get from [A]GPL. You still have the option to offer a different license in exchange for money.
Stops tivo-ization. And stops app-ification (making a GPL3 into a webapp and significant changes, but not sharing as well).
But most of the FLOSS orgs (FSF, etc) don't want blood from violator companies. Instead they just want mealy-mouth halfassed responses that amount to 'open the source'.
I remember what happened to copyright violators who copied Metallica and Britnry Spears back in the early 2000's. Fucking kids got hit with $4000 settlements or $135000 lawsuits.
That's the type of vigor and destructiveness I want FLOSS orgs to go after for-profit copyright violators.
To your point about government needing to backstop working conditions, the minimum wage in Indiana is 7 dollars an hour, and yet I can get a job paying 18 dollars an hour at Taco Bell. Why do you imagine that to be the case if employers have so much bargaining power?
There is something I call the restaurant quality economy measure, a tracking method of how the economy is doing. If you go into a place like Taco Bell, or some otherwise middling restaurant and the service is really bad, and take this as a trend over a lot of eateries then is very likely you live in good economic times. Now switch that, if the average crappy place you go into has really good service then that's a good sign things have gone wrong.
Quality workers have moved down the economic ladder of employment. These people would gladly be doing something that paid more and had more prestige, but that employment doesn't exist.
What does that have to do with your statement. It's when the economy goes really bad employees realize they are in the position of power. It's this pretty much this way right now in most computing related employment, most companies have tightened down and invested more in AI than people. This means your workers will put up with a lot more bullshit in order to not be fired. And when the economy is doing bad all over, that's when the employers break out the abusive bullshit because they can? Are you going to go get a different job?
Be glad the law exists then.
So no, to hell with that paternalism.
I got a perfect score on the SAT reading comprehension section. Thanks for that valuation contribution to the discussion.
> If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. Why does this government need to butt in?
This legislation...does not affect you then. All it's saying is that the employer cannot require you to respond to something on 9pm on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday unless you are paid for it. You are still free to do so, it's just that your employer can't fire you if you don't. This seems sort of reasonable to me.
So, why would they do something that works against them? Think about it. Do you go out of your way to advocate against yourself? No, right? So why would you expect them to do that? It’s just not a reasonable expectation.
Now, they might still do it anyway. Great, but you can’t expect that. So, we need to curb the incentives to get the desired behavior.
It’s just the dynamics of human behavior. Companies aren’t some magical beast - they, too, fact the push and pull of human behavior and incentives.
Laws like this often happen in the states first, if/when they catch on, it puts pressure on the federal government; often to avoid the confusion of 50 different variations on the law.
Are there statistics somewhere about what percent of people in various roles get asked but know they're safe declining, or mistakenly think they can't decline, or correctly think they'd get in trouble for declining, or don't get asked but think they have to anyway?
Most people just want to pretend everything is fine. They sleep better at night.
Why are you trying to deny people the representation they deserve and prevent the government from doing something people might want? Seems like some ideologically-based bullshit to me.
Again I ask why you seek to deny others their rights?
While in theory the market punishes bad employers by making people not want to work for them, the reality is that for all but the most in-demand individuals, the power asymmetry between an individual and their employer is such that some level of government regulation is probably needed to maintain reasonable working conditions. You could certainly argue whether regulating this particular thing is a good idea or not of course.
For the same reason anything is a government issue, i.e. that we regulate acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as a society, and periodically adjust what we find acceptable?
If your employer starts dumping large amounts of trash on your property tomorrow and says "oh that's just part of our relationship with you", I bet you'll want to get the government involved real quick because you never agreed to this.
> But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so.
That's exactly what this legislation is doing. All it's saying is, if you want off-hours work, make it explicit rather than implicit. If you fire people by expecting firefighting when it's not specified in the contract, you will break the law.
Conversely, I've seen the latest heat wave in France to try to justify global warming all over HN comments, when the reality is that this is temperature and not climate.
"Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other."
If someone that worked for me is unwilling to help out in these situations occasionally, I wouldn't make them do anything (and follow the law). I also wouldn't promote them.
Many higher level positions require a certain level of responsibility, and this would just show me that the person can't handle it.
I do agree though. If this law were in Michigan and I had a company here, any job that required after hours communication would be outsourced to another state or country.
I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.
I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.
Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.
Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.
Someone with 3rd grade reading comprehension should be able to realize the comment about IBM era thinkpads were directed at your coworkers, not you. Then again, there was a recent OCED report about how around 7% of tertiary students have the literacy skills of a 10 year old, so that might explain why there are people who proudly proclaim they passed third grade, but nonetheless have worse comprehension.
>Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.
See my subsequent remark about "...they don't want to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.".
You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)
Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too
Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.
Only if they're using RFC 6238 TOTP, and not some weird 2fa app. It's ironic you mention authy because they have their own weird TOTP scheme, along with push notification based approval system.
But yeah, things can get messy depending on the specifics, but not installing random apps on your personal phone seems like a pretty reasonable line to make.
I only mentioned Authy cause it was my go-to for 2fa before they got acquired
If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device".
My private phone is not for their use, ever.
There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.
[1] https://duo.com/
No, but it's also not reasonable for them to only offer something that can't be used with other software. Use a different 2FA scheme
that means they need to provide it
If its the terrible MS authenticator or DUO, then get me a device.
My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
So I do have work stuff on my personal phone, but with no notifications whatsoever. Only works because I'm in a position where it's acceptable to require all communications to go through emails or messaging apps though.
Im with GP, absolutely no work stuff on my personal phone
For example, if Apple can verify the device was purchased by a corporate entity and then enrolled in an mobile device management system, it will allow a lot of things that it won't allow on a personal device - things that can be used for monitoring.
Like what for example? They can’t access any chat messages or app data. Even your location is impossible to obtain without your knowledge.
You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.
I used to get called a lot, when my boss also ran the critical incident team. These days, I don’t get called much, the there is always a looming threat. I miss the days when being done with work meant that I was actually done with work.
If Alex was previously on-call from time to time and got a raise to account for that typical amount of on-call, it sounds like you think that's fair? (It does sound fair to me.) Then, Bailey is hired at the same exact pay as Alex and also has to occasionally be on-call. Is Bailey truly "getting nothing"? Is Alex's pay fair and Bailey's identical pay unfair? I don't think so.
If you want to pass a law that requires employers to divide up pay differently than they currently do, that's totally fine; in some corner cases, it will result in a net pay increase for lower-paid employees.
It could be called an edge case, but when the on-call pay is built into the base salary, it creates the expectation that a person is never off the clock and no time is truly their own. It also removes the incentive to minimize on-call work.
With the 5 units, if they work more, they get more. With base pay only, every time that phone rings their hourly rate drops.
It may just be optics, but optics make a difference.
Engineering a system that doesn’t require off-hours work comes with a financial penalty to the team members if there’s explicitly segregated on-call pay. Write a good system and your pay drops to 95 units.
It's happening all the time. Lobbied legislators will give some token QoL improvement for the masses and then give the 0.1% a nice big gimme in return.
They generally let people volunteer to be on call. But since everyone wants their weekends and evening it’s usually the same person. One of the other devs and I have been on primary rotation for about 2 1/2 years now. It’s a shame more employees don’t compensate for on call better. And honestly our teams on call is not a regular occurrence it’s maybe once every 2 weeks we’ll get a call for something that’s a 5 minute fix.
I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses:
- handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result.
- scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future.
- if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
The only reason we get compensated at all is because of legislation. They'll pay us as little and work us as hard as they're legally and physically able to.
> ... rules on when and for what reason an employer could contact an employee outside of a normal work schedule.
This is no blanket 'thou shalt not call thy employees after hours' law.
All this is doing is preventing employers from effectively pulling a bait and switch, by implicitly expecting employees to be available 24/7 for whatever reason. If you've ever been in a situation where your boss just fucking calls you because of some asinine reason ("hey I just had an idea...) then you know how terrible it is. Nothing spoilt my weekends as much as a boss calling and I'm thinking "o shit prod is down" or whatever, and then it's just him asking on a delivery date for a feature because he's having drinks with the client now and they were asking.
Now, if there is a requirement for after hours availability, it has to be stated in the contract, and the compensation must accordingly reflect this additional requirement.
I think it's great this is happening.
TBH the bill is kind of unclear on this. It seems to say if the employee tells the employer they are available 5pm-9pm each day then that is ok, but if the employer asks them to be available 5pm-9pm then the employee is paid 1.5x overtime for the whole 4-hour chunk even if asked to just do a few minutes of work sometime during that chunk.
If your need is so urgent that you would fire the EA for not checking the email between 5-9pm, then you are exactly the sort of over-reaching employer that the bill is targeting. You have two options:
- You can say that the EA must check at 9pm and pay them 1.5x the hourly rate for an hour. If they don't do it, you can fire them.
- If the EA is free, they still may check and schedule between 5-9pm, but you can't fire them if they don't. You can only fire them if they don't do it correctly between the 9-5 hours. This way you don't pay any overtime, but you don't overreach either.
This seems to reasonably reflect the value you place on after-hours work.
The law seems clumsy, but the principle of availability being a sacrifice by the employee is sound.
As an employee you want to be able to draw the line, and this lets you do that. When you need to do that, you're already in a pretty bad position to begin with
Yes, some people do overtime, but society structured around the fact that workers are people too with a right to free (truly free) time, and maybe you as a customer don't have a "right" to be feed at 2 am, or to buy stuff on sundays. Even if that means we are "europoor" or customers pay higher prices, something that economic theory asserts but reality not so much.
The main detriment to quality of life of retail workers is that most of them are kept part time below the number of hours where employer health insurance is mandatory, and that most large businesses no longer do set weekly shift schedules, and instead it's algorithmically determined and random.
You're basically the reason these rules are being proposed.
Thanks for making the case for laws like this.
The more you try to quantify this, the better the case for the law gets.
If you need an executive assistant to be available in the evenings, hire evening cover. If it's not worth it to the employer pay for that cover, then why should it be on the employee to do that work for free during their time off?
Employers need to remember that employees often don't have a stake in the business. Free extra work gains them nothing, and loses them what little free time they had. That's not a trade, it's theft of time through a power imbalance.
It's reasonable for a business to pay the proper price for the full services it receives from it's staff. Businesses have proven they're unable to be fair in this regard, so it's reasonable to regulate them.
Then you'd still need legislation for the compensation, or it ain't happening.
> Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list.
Not allowed to require someone to pick up the phone != not allowed to call them. And I think some general sense still applies, the spirit of the law, if you will. If it happens rarely, is only about important stuff, is not taken for granted (!), I think most people wouldn't mind. If you treat a worker well and appreciate them doing something they didn't have to do, they will notice. And if they're a jerk causing grief for the company over technicalities, just because they can, you will notice, and the sooner the better.
But let's say no, you can't even look at them once they're off the clock, much less ask them anything. Then the person who fucked up the handover will never do whatever mistake lead to that again. If it was an unavoidable thing, something that just happens every now and then, a cosmic ray that flipped a bit -- why expect to be able to externalize those costs to the unpaid worker? It's part of the business, whatever that business is.
> eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
Funny how it's never the third yacht for the CEO who cannot even not look goofy on one that does that, but grandma not being called from one of her 3 jobs at 2am, that will absolutely drive costs through the roof!
Kidding aside though, you opened with
> my friends would de-prioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?
But by the end of your comment, this is a problem that raises prices for everyone? Huh? Am I missing something?
And hey, it also slightly raises salaries and lowers blood pressure for everyone. It means that when a company does something for me, I know someone wasn't mistreated to make it happen. That's just a cool thing I want as much of in my life as possible.
It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?
Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?
Are you “compensated for being oncall” if your contract says you may do some unspecified amount of oncall, and your pay doesn’t change if you do or don’t?
You could imagine a judge / regulator deciding either way right?
I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.
In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
There are some true scumbags out there.
Usually about covering shifts.
Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business.
Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.
It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.
I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.
More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.
This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.
I've been fortunate to have a very limited amount of on-call events. At one place for 3.5 years there was 1 event. In another place there's been 2 in the last 9 months but on the bright side these events are taken seriously in the sense that dev time is immediately prioritized to hopefully prevent them from happening in the future.
All code being written gets reviewed by someone and there's an expectation tests are included. Of course that doesn't prevent all bugs, but there's an attempt at quality control by the teams producing the code.
I think part of this role (SRE / platform / DevOps / whatever you want to classify this as) is technical implementation but also coming up with systems and workflows to reduce downtime and risk when performing deployments. Not all management is open to change but IMO it should be brought up and taken seriously. There are companies out there who care about both providing value to customers while also keeping team morale high.
IME, very few companies care they are screwing up their employees' lives. It's why these laws are good since it puts financial cost on them and gives their employees cover.
I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
I vaguely remember a few years ago there was some news pushing new scheduling software that was supposed to help make schedules more predictable, and how it wasn't working to full potential because store managers wouldn't trust it.
But I don't think the bill in question here would actually do anything to affect that issue?
It could also be a personality thing or a worldview thing.
Some people just have a hard time saying "no" in general, or are constantly looking for reasons to jump at shadows.
Or there's people teaching that the world runs on class warfare and anyone with any amount of power is always looking for an excuse to abuse that power.
Companies should be required to provide the tools needed, and that should include phone if a phone app is required to be used as part of the job. I'd say a replacement guarantee could work, but these sorts of places will fire someone if they requested such a guaranty be fulfilled so the only way is total ban.
Now on the opposite side, I also understand that there can be a handful of cases in a year where you really need to work outside the work hours, law should not be making businesses so inflexible that they are doomed to fail.
I'm originally from Michigan and have worked at lots of different jobs. I rarely ever was required to respond after hours, and if I did, it was part of my job (and explained to me in detail when I accepted the position).
Does this apply to Doctors and Nurses?
Many moons ago, when I signed up to work at Samsung Austin Semiconductor they told me I might be responsible for odd hours. I agreed to this and had a pager strapped to my body until the day I quit the job 3 years later. No one seems to get weird about a doctor-style pager ripping employees out of slumber at 2am. The only time I got a break from the pager is when I was on a 777 on my way to South Korea. Then I got a new kind of pager when I arrived. Somehow teams messages and outlook are super evil by comparison to this.
It's a small change in the macro, but doing this enabled me to (a) choose the device I want, (b) keep work stuff off of my personal phone, and, most importantly, (c) COMPLETELY disconnect from work when the day is done. This became necessary after COVID induced WFH forced work into the home and expectations around being "on" all of the time became more pervasive.
That said, "Work Profile" is one of Android's best features, and I'd love for iOS to have something equivalent. It's not as good as a physical separation, but it's the next best thing.
My problem is that my customers prefer to reach me over iMessage, and porting my number to any "business phone in an app" means I'd be downgrading to unreliable SMS in a green bubble. So if I want to separate work/personal use, I'd need to carry a second iPhone.
It will be too easy for employers to say to the DOL the employee was not actually required to respond to the work-related matter when they told the employee they are expected to. Laws like these don't solve problems (bargaining power disparity caused by a variety of factors), they solve symptoms. It may not have a significant effect.
I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
It does actually work - think of it like a speed limit. If everyone is forced to go at a certain maximum speed (ie. the same max no. of contact hours per week per employee) then it’s not a (relative) loss if a business can’t operate at “full capacity” for more hours than its competitors.
Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.
Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.
Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".
It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
Further for non fixed work schedules any shifts that aren't scheduled two weeks in advance should be paid overtime.
Personally, I was very lucky. I recognize it was almost all luck. Born at the right place to the right people. Opportunities I was lucky to have because of that. Winning when gambling on relationships, professional work, and in the capital markets. I advocate for unlucky people whenever possible, because humans who did not choose to be here should not suffer due to their poor luck.
“We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” —- Maurice Allais
Will she not show up or will she tell her constituents that THEY need to do the meeting at HER working hours?
Arguably the politician works for us so we can decide their working hours.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.