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Seoul Considers Messaging Ban After Work Hours (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The city legislature of Seoul, South Korea, is considering implementing a law that would ban after work messaging to employees, in an effort to reduce work-related stress among employees. Members of the Seoul Metropolitan Council proposed a revision to a public ordinance that would ban after-work messaging to employees of the city's government. The new rule is an attempt to guarantee employees the right to restand states that employee privacy must not be subject to employer contact outside of work hours. If passed, it would ban managers from contacting public sector employees after work hours through phone calls, text messaging, or social networking. Kim Kwang-soo, one of the councilors who submitted the ordinance revision, said that the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) must guarantee the rights of city workers by protecting them from undue stress. He said, "Of course SMG officials must always be prepared for the needs of citizens, but many of them are working under conditions that infringe on their right to rest."
The always on culture means that basically you are never really on just stuck in a state between on and off and it leads to dumb decisions - Apple's Macbook design team is a prime example
**Life is too short to be serious**
The title and summary are nearly impossible to read and understand, holy cow.
Is there an ongoing contest to come up with the worst headline on /. ?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Honestly, is it too much to ask you to reword the title so it actually makes sense?
"Seoul Considers Messaging Ban After Work Messaging To Employees"
glad you caught that one early guys
Outright bans are too ham-handed. What about a yearly limit or stepped tax or an hour's worth of overtime pay per message as a discouragement.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm contacted outside work hours because our business needs to operate during those hours and if there is a problem, someone has to take care of it. This idea is completely bonkers.
Life is too short and too important to { take seriously | use windows }.
Wait, isn't that the country with the "8 Goddesses"?
The city legislature of Seoul, South Korea, is considering implementing a law that would ban after work messaging to employees...
It's about time. What a chaebol's employees choose to do between 2 and 6 AM is their own damn business.
If you are a 24/7 shop then you should have adequate staffing for 2nd and 3rd shifts.
If your business requires 24/7 attention and you have not staffed for that - your business will probably not survive. Emergencies can happen at any time. It is not reasonable to expect that your key staff never take a day off or a sick day. Why would you expect that they be available at all times?
As a licensed message therapist, I recommend a happy ending message to relieve stress and promote healthy back alignment.
How are they suppose to hire people, if they can't contact people "after hours". Or what about if they need to call someone in to work more hours?
"right to rest and"???
will be removed in Trans-Pacific Partnership lawsuit in a Investor-state dispute settlement as it's bad for business.
wpuldn't that depend on which shift you were on?
I read that as "after work massages.."
I couldn't figure out why massages would increase stress...
It's been a long week, I'll see myself out.
I spent a few years working for a Canadian municipality. Work COULD contact you after hours, but you were getting paid OT (with a minimum for hour much time you got to claim, even if the actual work was only 30 seconds). If you actually got called back into work you got to claim a minimum of 4 hours (at time and a half, so really 6 hours) even if it was only 15 minutes of work. This setup allowed our workplace to deal with emergencies, but the high cost to the employer made sure it was only used for mission-critical things.
Did you even read the summary? This does not apply to employees of businesses. The city decided not to contact their own employees after work hours. How would the Trans-Pacific Partnership be used to force the city to contact its employees?
Philipp
If a business needs to be active 24/7 then they should be paying to make that happen. Employees aren't the property of corporations.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If you want me 24/7, you pay me 24/7. Else my phone is off the moment my workday's over. You get what you pay for. Pay more, get more.
Damn freeloaders.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't work in a job where I need to be on call anymore, but I have in the past. It sucks, especially one place where they offshored all the systems monitoring to some company that was literally just passing through alerts that could be taken care of during working hours. More frequently, I do see employers who feel they can expect 24/7 coverage from their IT staff without paying for it. Given Korean work culture, I can only imagine how much worse the pressure is on keeping people working all the time.
If something is that much of an emergency if it fails, a second and third shift skeleton crew should exist and defined procedures should be in place to mitigate issues. Companies don't want to pay for that and feel like they can lean on their employees. I've done off hours support in the past and have little problem with it if I'm compensated for it either in time off or overtime pay. I just don't think workers should be bullied into giving away their personal time for free. I highly doubt MasterCard or American Express just shuts off the lights in their data centers at 5 PM and says "Oh, Bob has a pager, he can fix it."
Companies have to do a realistic analysis of costs for downtime, and if they're too high, the skeleton crew wins out. That, or maybe whatever phone app they're creating is not mission-critical if it fails in the middle of the night,
And so long as you're either not *expected* to be permanently available, that's not a problem. The issue is that some companies do not have staff/compensation for a 24/7/365 availability, but expect that their regular staff be available outside work hours as such. That means if you're in a movie, at the pool, on the road, drinking, etc and the server goes down for several hours, you get written up for it or even fired. It's extremely detrimental to the social lives and well-being of IT workers.
It doesn't mean that they need to have extra staff just for the off-hours. A common way in many industries is to have an adequately staffed department for the daylight hours, and then a rotating daily/weekly "pager" for the off-hours. The person with the pager is expected to be available and respond within a reasonable time. This isn't just an IT solution. I have relatives that work in various industries that offer "disaster recovery" services (think: broken furnace, floods, etc) that also do on-call pager duty.
The problem there again is that this role is in many companies uncompensated. That essentially means employees are "on-the-clock" for free, as they are not able to carry on with their normal lives outside work.
It's fine if you're on pager, properly compensated for such, and not given an unreasonable amount of on-call time outside regular hours. The problem is that *many* companies are cheap and don't do it that way, putting all the onus on the employee. It is *NOT* an unreasonable expense to compensate your employees for giving up *their* personal lives/time, that's a cost of doing business. If you can't afford it, you shouldn't be doing business.
Wouldn't this just result in replacing on-call rotations with shift rotations? Like, if you can't call me for a 2am emergency, doesn't that mean a representative from my group needs to be in the office at all times? That sounds awful.
hi
The city legislature of Seoul, South Korea, is considering implementing a law that would ban after work messaging to employees
What would you do if you needed something done after hours and were willing to pay for it, though?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Was North Korea messaging their government workers after office hours? That might explain a lot. Not a whole lot; still, quite a lot.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.