Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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