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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.""
If I'm off the clock, I should be able to completely ignore work and everything work-related. I should be able to leave my work smartphone in the office.
Isn't that Italian?
Tight labour laws are not something to be feared.
Ah, so this explains why Silicon Valley is located in France.
Seriously, if someone wants to work crazy hours, why not let them?
I had that phase in my career, and it paid off. I'm in a different phase now. I just choose not to work after hours. If my employer didn't like that, I'd have found a better job by now. Same thing for travel - I used to travel a ton. Now I don't want to, and so I found a place to work with no travel. I'm a grownup, I can take care of myself, thank-you-very-much.
get rid of salary pay / make it have a high level before you get out of having to pay OT.
once workers start billing OT for doing work stuff at home then it will stop.
So what do you do about colleagues in other time-zones? Or on other shifts? Are they not allowed to email you outside of the times you're both at work - assuming there is any overlap at all?
Email is not IM; it's not designed to require or expect an immediate response. Nothing about sending an email necessitates that it must be acted upon immediately.
"France fails at having an Internationally competitive workforce."
Good for them. In the race to the bottom, France's "failure" sounds more fun than being the winner.
You clearly never worked in a factory..
See what that gets you after a few years when your salary has effectively dropped 5% due to raises failing to keep pace with inflation. Where do you turn when all the jobs in town are shit and your pay is stagnating? There's not always an individual option available.
At that point, the only option left will be collective action against the company. The only question remaining is how long it will take for tech workers to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that half of them will never afford retirement at the current pace of things.
Until your boss starts howling that he sent you an email at 8pm and you didn't reply to it until morning.
Increasingly, companies are expecting you to put in your day, and then still work all of the rest of the day.
My wife's company just keeps scheduling after hours work, piling on the day to day work, and expecting that people will magically do their full work week and cover all of the after-hours work.
At a certain point, companies need to understand they don't own the right to all of your time in a week, and there is a point in the day where you say "and, I'm finished for today".
But companies want to run their employees like rented mules.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And expecting "free" healthcare is in some ways a form of bitching about others being more successful...
No, it's a sign that you live in a civilised society.
People shouldn't go bankrupt because they are sick, or have to choose which severed finger to have reattached because they can only afford one. Children shouldn't go without treatment because their parents can't afford it. Yet all those things happen in America.