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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.
I already ignore my bosses' emails during working hours.
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.
Well colour me puzzled. Surely the expression "whatever the French call la dolce vita" demonstrates that, whatever the French do call it, they don't call it la dolce vita? So he knows it's not a French expression, he just doesn't know what the equivalent expression in French is.
Well done for supplying the French equivalent.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
That's good for workers in the short term, it really is ridiculous how much work intrudes into our personal lives anymore, to where a company can practically own you; I can somewhat relate, having recently been made to go "on call" at work but where we're not really "on call" but expected to actively monitor 40 sites for a week, with a 4 week rotation among employees (and compensation for this new duty.. what's that? Only happens if we actually engage an issue, we're not paid for just the monitoring) I love how an employer can just change the terms of your employment, but it's not like I can walk in and declare I'm now going to make $8,000 more a year. BTW, we have a union, they don't do squat.. they just hit you for dues. ...and provide overtime pay, definitely.
OTOH, this will ultimately put French businesses at a serious disadvantage in competing with other countrys' businesses, as their response time to an issue may be greatly reduced.
Rather than outright ban it, maybe just some solid restrictions on say, 11pm to 6am as off limits.. or alternating weeks or something
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
In the 1980's, IBM (among others) invested lots of money to have legislation passed that makes programmers, engineers, and sysadmins into "salaried professionals" so that they wouldn't have to pay overtime.
The only way that could possibly be reversed is a group larger and more powerful than the owners of tech companies fighting to reverse it; that is to say, the organized tech workers will have fight for our own standard of living. We won't be able to do that until we are actually organized, though. Perhaps the sporadically striking fast food workers who were previously thought to be powerless can set an example for us.
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.
Why should that be?! for example with flex time and all that it can very easy be that I will email someone who is already home with a "This is important, can you do this ASAP." I fully expect it to be done first thing in the morning the next working day, no more no less. Why should I not be able to do that?!?
On the other hand I also am sort of against all this private device / access company services outside of work thing. Why should someone access their work email outside of work? Outside of business hours I am not reachable, nor do I expect you to be, end of story. The only exception to that are people that are "on call", but they should get paid for that.
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.
A fine? And if the business is willing to pay it as the cost of doing business?
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
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.
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:
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.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
"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.
Many people seem to enjoy strict segregation of work and personal life. I don't. I like flexibility; I like being able to leave work for a few hours in the middle of the day to go to a kids' school play, or go for a bike ride, or go skiing (next winter I'll be working from home full-time, 20 minutes from a ski resort; I'm seriously planning to be skiing from 9-11 AM almost daily) or whatever. I like being able to, with a totally clear conscience, spend an hour reading and posting on slashdot or G+ or whatever. I also like being able to work in the evening when inspiration strikes, or to make up for time spent away from work during the day, or for whatever reason. Heck, maybe I just want to and for whatever reason don't have anything better to do just then.
I don't live to work, but I like my work, and I don't like drawing a sharp line separating work and non-work. I think that sort of separation is a recent invention anyway; historically work has been a part of life rather than walled off into a particular portion of each day. Of course, I have no objection to people who prefer to manage their work/life balance by sharply separating them. If that what works for them, more power to them. It's not my preference, though, and it's not the only way to balance the two. It's not something that should be legislated.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Mod this guy up because he actuall read all the words and demonstrated the ability to grok basic sentence structure.
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You clearly never worked in a factory..
No, what this not-a-law does is makes it harder for your boss to sack you for not doing work outside working hours.
If you want to try and climb the slippery pole by brownnosing, feel free.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
...It is only natural that they abolish the after-work email.
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.
What you described is not prohibited by the agreement.
The idea is only to count the work you do 24/7 as "working hours". And any hour above 35h / week will give you some rights (salary, vacations, ...).
That way, your work contract will be clearer -- no hidden things, no change in situation like your boss sending you e-mails more and more without a pay increase to reflect the extra hours you're doing.
But again, it does not prevent you to check your e-mails at home.
Disclaimer : I'm french.
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.
Its called courrier electronique.
Have gnu, will travel.
I work for a European company in the US. Our work rules are very different because we're a multinational and HR is handled on a regional basis. Every single one of my colleagues complains about the French 35 hour week and their unwillingness to put in crazy hours like Americans do. I happen to agree with the French on this one, and this comes from a lot of experience working in several different work environments.
US workers love to point to the "lazy socialist French" and make fun of their long vacations and very relaxed work style. And at the same time, they don't realize that they live longer, have better family lives, and are generally better adjusted than most stressed out Americans. Unemployment is higher than it is here, but their society isn't structured around crushing anyone who doesn't have a job. As an example, look at how much people complained about continuing the meager unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed people in the US. People were complaining about giving someone who has no hope of getting another job ever a couple hundred dollars a week to survive on. Long term unemployed this time around aren't lazy -- this time, all the old school manufacturing jobs are being thrown out of the economy, leaving people with average or below average intelligence with no hope of anything beyond fast food employment. But that's another worry for another time.
Back to work hours and work/life balance -- I am incredibly lucky in that I have a job in IT with lots of flexibility. Lots of my peers don't. Employers are constantly trying to squeeze every last minute of work out of their existing resources rather than adding more. Mine is too, but less so...I've been trying to get us another head for quite some time now and it's very hard. I have no problem with having a healthy work ethic, and people do need to be motivated. I do have a problem when I see employers taking advantage of people who don't realize they're being taken advantage of. Especially in IT, I have witnessed a lot of "hero culture" employers who demand that employees be available 24/7 even when it's not really necessary. Millennials are especially susceptible to this because they're used to being tethered to social media all day long. I think this is one of the reasons companies prefer younger workers -- fewer non-work demands on their time and a willingness to work crazy hours simply because they haven't figured out that their employer won't extend them the same loyalty down the road. In my opinion, your average employee is deluding him or herself into thinking that their job is super-important, that everyone else is lazy, and that their employer values them immensely. Evidence shows that this is no longer the case. It may have been in the 50s/60s "job for life" era, but unfortunately that's gone for the most part.
I'm also a new parent, and if you don't have experience, it's very hard to explain the drain on your free time that this places on you if you're doing it right and paying attention to your family. I see stressed out parents working for employers who don't give a damn responding to work emails at 2 in the morning simply because their employer expects that of them. I'll _glance_ at my messages once or twice in the evening, but I don't feel pressure to jump in and fix something right away -- unless something's literally on fire, it can wait. My opinion is this -- if something is really critical enough to require 24/7 coverage, then staff it that way. If you aren't willing to do that, then it's not critical. If the US were to adopt a "no after hours contact" rule or 35-hour week, it would reduce unemployment simply because companies would have to hire more resources. Either that, or a whole lot of "priority 1 mission critical" stuff would suddenly become less so.
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.
Getting paid from the time the phone rings to the time the issue is taken care of is not a good deal. If you are on call, you should be paid for being on call. I don't know that I would argue full wages, but certainly having a situation where your private time could be interrupted is providing a service that should be paid for.
I'm French, and I briefly worked for a Dutch firm. I was amazed at lunch in the break room: by the time I had finished my quick lunch (under an hour !) at least 3 Dutch colleagues had come and gone next to me.
Then again, they leave work much earlier than we do.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.