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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.
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.
We don't let people work crazy hours because it allows employers to take advantage of the desperate, poor, and ignorant.
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.
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.
Seriously, if someone wants to work crazy hours, why not let them?
Nothing stopping you.
All this says is the boss can't fire you for not replying to his out-of-hours email.
(Previously, he might have made an attempt to accuse you of "faut grave", a grave dereliction of duty, which could get you fired without unemployment insurance).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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)
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.