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France's After Work Email Ban Is 1 Step Closer To Reality (huffingtonpost.ca)
Jesse Ferreras, writing for Huffington Post: France is that much closer to becoming the first country to ban after-work emails. The country's lower parliamentary house passed a bill this week that would ban companies with 50 or more employees from sending emails outside regular work hours, BBC News reported. It now goes to the Senate, where members will study it before sending it back to the National Assembly to enshrine it in French law. The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails. And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.Hamon adds: "Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash -- like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails -- they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down."
Because the next day, your boss is screaming at you for not answering his "emergency" email the night before.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I don't think it is.
The benefit of people dealing with email after work is probably not something that has a huge impact on the company's bottom line. Very few things can't wait until the morning.
Mostly this is more a problem of pushy managers rather than business need.
Some employers forbid their employees from turning off their work phones at any time. Furthermore, even if their isn't such a policy in place, any employee who doesn't respond after hours may be seen as "not a team player". Putting pressure on the employers not to allow employee e-mailing outside the working day may be the only way to tackle the problem.
Even if other countries adopt this policy, it won't work because of time zone differences. China is six hours ahead of France, the USA is 6 to 9 hours behind France. Conducting international business becomes impossible.
Not impossible - delayed. The e-mails will wait until someone can read them. Many businesses already have a policy that electronic communication will be answered within 1 business day.
yeah, with the great job market every one has, I'm sure that will work out well for you.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Even if other countries adopt this policy, it won't work because of time zone differences. China is six hours ahead of France, the USA is 6 to 9 hours behind France. Conducting international business becomes impossible.
No, it just requires a more specific solution. Just a few that occur to me immediately:
(1) Unless the business is especially urgent, just have a policy that emails will be replied to within 24 hours. That's pretty reasonable for most circumstances, except for emergencies or if you're actually providing a 24-hour service of some sort.
(2) If you are providing a 24-hour service of some sort, you just hire different employees with different effective business hours to cover all hours of the day. Or if your company opens a new division dealing with a business 6 hours different, change the effective business hours of a few employees to handle those transactions.
(3) If you need someone to deal with emergencies, presumably you could pay them "overtime" or something like that for their time... which is what businesses really should be doing when they require people to do stuff outside of business hours.
Basically -- you want people to be available to deal with stuff at other hours? PAY them to do so. Nothing hard about this.
Pro-top for French legislators: When you have 11% unemployment, and 0% GDP growth, perhaps you shouldn't be looking for ways to be even more hostile to employers.
Or perhaps you should, because they're obviously not doing things right.
It's the businesses that have to be able to adapt to the environment they're in - failure to do so isn't a failure of the environment. Sahara doesn't support penguins, and Antarctica doesn't support camels. Animals that migrate either place must adapt or die.
Businesses unwilling or unable to adapt to different countries are better off packing up and leaving, making room for those that are able to adapt to the local climate.