In Australia, there is a new law that protects workers from punishment for refusing to respond to work calls and emails from their employers outside work hours.
Is your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you’ve left for home?
Employees in Australia can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a new “right to disconnect” law designed to curb the creep of work emails and calls into personal lives.
The new rule, which came into force on Monday, means employees, in most cases, cannot be punished for refusing to read or respond to contacts from their employers outside work hours.
Supporters say the law gives workers the confidence to stand up against the steady invasion of their personal lives by work emails, texts and calls, a trend that has accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic scrambled the division between home and work.
“Before we had digital technology there was no encroachment, people would go home at the end of a shift and there would be no contact until they returned the following day,” said John Hopkins, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology.
“Now, globally it’s the norm to have emails, SMS, phone calls outside those hours, even when on holiday.”
Australians worked on average 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, according to a survey last year by the Australia Institute, which estimated the monetary value of the labor at A$130 billion ($88 billion).
The changes add Australia to a group of roughly two dozen countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America, that have similar laws.
Pioneer France introduced the rules in 2017 and a year later fined pest control firm Rentokil Initial 60,000 euros ($66,700) for requiring an employee to always have his phone on.
Rachel Abdelnour, who works in advertising, said the changes would help her disconnect in an industry where clients often have different working hours.
“I think it’s actually really important that we have laws like this,” she told Reuters. “We spend so much of our time connected to our phones, connected to our emails all day, and I think that it’s really hard to switch off as it is.”
To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers, who can refuse to respond only where it is reasonable to do so.
Determining whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia’s industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission, which must take into account an employee’s role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.
It has the power to issue a cease and desist order and, failing that, levy fines of up A$19,000 for an employee or up to A$94,000 for a company.
