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When US people come to Europe, they are shocked because indeed a business closes at 2 pm, and if you arrive at 2:05 pm it is your fault. If your contract says 9-5, you are not expected to work at 6 pm in the name of customers. The business need to hire someone to cover the evening, and customers get used to buy things in comercial hours.

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.

Retail workers in the US are paid hourly and clock in and clock out to shifts, with strict rules around schedules and breaks. If a retail business has a stated closing time (say, 7pm), and you show up at 7:05 (or honestly 6:55), you will not be served.

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.

One thing that happens a LOT in retail is, say if a store closes at 10pm, a customer will walk in at 9:58pm, be there for 30 min to an hour, and employees HAVE to stay until they leave and cannot kick them out. If they do, they can get written up. Not all businesses do this obviously, but I've worked in retail long enough to have seen this happen a lot.

that's fine if the business is paying overtime for those employees, i imagine if that bumps them above 32 hours (for health coverage requirements) or over 40 hours thus requiring overtime, and it happens enough, they'll hire a minimum wage security guard to keep customers from coming in at 2 'til.

Haha, no way is the store I'm talking about ever hiring a security guard. Corporate doesn't give them enough money to hire enough people, let alone a security guard.

All of these are the problem of the business, and negatively impact the employees ability to disconnect and enjoy their free time.

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.

> But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening

Thanks for making the case for laws like this.

Exactly, the loosey-goosey "Just do it a few times in the evening" is the real trigger here. How many times exactly?

The more you try to quantify this, the better the case for the law gets.

It may only seem like a small ask for you to tell an EA to do something afterhours but it's a significant amount of work on their end and it restricts the kind of activities they can do because you have effectively made them on call 24/7.

You're basically the reason these rules are being proposed.

> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.

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.

In exactly 0 of my hiring decisions, ever, was legislation a reason why someone is paid.

The very first paragraph in TFA says:

> ... 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.

IANAL so maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but my understanding of the bill (https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduce...) is that you have to compensate for the full set of hours of availability even if no work is being done? I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates).

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.

> I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates).

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.

You really should pay for that expectation. As you describe it, the EA would not be able to schedule any evening activity that took her away from electronics for too long.

The law seems clumsy, but the principle of availability being a sacrifice by the employee is sound.

Legislation only exists because some people won't be good people without a stick involved. So, in general, I think your expectation is valid, but that's not what you use the stick for.

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

> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.

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.