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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.