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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."
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.