New French Law Prohibits After-Hours Work Emails

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Lucy Mangan reports at The Guardian that a new labor agreement in France means that employees must ignore their bosses' work emails once they are out of the office and relaxing at home – even on their smartphones. Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, and Deloitte), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. "We must also measure digital working time," says Michel De La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers. "We can admit extra work in exceptional circumstances but we must always come back to what is normal, which is to unplug, to stop being permanently at work." However critics say it will impose further red tape on French businesses, which already face some of the world's tightest labor laws." (Continues) "However according to Simon Kelner French productivity levels outstrip those of Britain and Germany, and French satisfaction with their quality of life is above the OECD average. "No wonder, we may say. We'd all like to take a couple of hours off for lunch, washed down with a nice glass of Côtes du Rhône, and then switch our phones off as soon as we leave work. It's just that our bosses won't let us.""

Comments

Re:In other news...

[Eunuchswear]

France fails at having an Internationally competitive workforce.

Don't be ridiculous, France has one of the most productive workforces in the world (in GDP/worker and GDP/hour worked).

The Guardian has it wrong

[Orphis]

It isn't forbidden to read emails, it is forbidden for employers to require the employees to read them or be reachable through their personal or company phone.
Employees must be allowed to have a 11h "blackout" between two consecutive working days and 35h during weekends.
If an employee wants to read emails and do extra work, it's up to him, but it can't be imposed.

And this is an agreement just for some business types (mainly IT related), not everyone.

Boomerang

[barlevg]

My boss has started using this, because he knows that if I see an email come in at 10pm, I will open it on my phone, read it, and then promptly forget about it before I get to work the next morning.

The Guardian article is not accurate

[taikedz]

Reading the original article on Les Echos.fr, it seems to me this is not law but an agreement between a coalition of enterprise owners and the unions - they've signed an agreement to implement this.

La semaine dernière, après six mois de négociation, le patronat des sociétés d’ingénierie et de conseil et des bureaux d’études (Syntec et Cinov) a signé avec la CFDT et la CGC (56% de leurs salariés à elles deux) un avenant à l’accord de 1999 sur les 35 heures qui pourrait avoir valeur d’exemple.

"Last week, after six months of negotiation, [ a union of ] bosses of engineering, consulting and design departments (Syntec and Cinov) signed with CFDT and CGC [workers' unions] (56% of their joint workforce) an ammendment to the 1999 agreement on the right to 35 hour working week which could set an example [to the rest of the country?]."

A third union that didn't sign, the CGT, is actually deploring the fact that it still has a loophole allowing it to be ignored, and a previous agreement between the two camps to try and improve working conditions was struck down by a court of law:

Cela suffira-t-il à convaincre les juges? L’avenant est un nouvel épisode du feuilleton juridique, que les signataires espèrent être le dernier dans leur profession. En avril 2013, la Cour de cassation avait invalidé le précédent dispositif, jugeant le contrôle de l’amplitude et de la charge de travail insuffisant.

Will it be enough to convince the judges? The amendment is a new episode in this jurisdiction saga, which the signatories hope to be the last in their profession. In April 2013, a high court rejected their last attempt, judging that the control of the amplitude and amount of work insufficient.

French journalistic style is not as easy to decipher as English-language journalism -- the French style is very fond of appearing as literary as possible. I'll post extra translations at some point if anybody wants.

Re:The Guardian article is not accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

As a French, I will add a few things :
- this agreement isn't for all french worker, but only for specific workers under a specific labor agreement (mainly for people working in IT as contractor)
- these specific workers work on a fixed number of days per year
- when working on a fixed number of days per year, you have to do at least 8 hour per day of work, but it can be extended without being paid or considered as OT
- this "agreement" can be read/understood as : "great, we can now have our employes for 13 hours per day without risk of being harmed by the law"

There was an "unsaid rules" in France that said that "you have a work phone -> you need to answer it as soon as you have a mail, call, etc" : let's say that not obeying this "rules" can be quite "bad"

Being "on call", isn't well paid, on the contrary

Keep dreaming

[Noryungi]

One point that is not in the original Guardian article is that this is a proposal only, and a proposal that only applies to French companies that are part of the "Syntec" work agreement.

- Huh?

Yes, in France, companies can adhere to negociated work agreements (named "accord") that define more precisely than the French laws what is possible and is not possible. Syntec is one such agreement, and it pretty much covers the vast majority of IT firms.

Now... What you, gentle reader, need to know, is that that the Syntec agreement is not really that nice to IT employees, as it also defines a lot of things (unpaid overtime, etc.) that are not in the interests of the workers, to say the least. And many IT firms choose not to belong to Syntec, but instead to one of the "accords" that are even more constraining. The company I work with (''it-whose-name-shall-not-ever-be-said-aloud'') belongs to an "accord" that is used to define rules... for the steel industry.

And before anyone starts foaming at the mouth about how French workers are lazy and only work 35h per week: I don't know ANYONE, and I mean ANYONE in France who works 35 hours per week, except maybe a few government employees and McDonald's workers. Yes, I know a lot of people in France who work much longer than that and, yes, I am one of them. Just so you know.