Slashdot Mirror
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 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?
If my company doesn't want to employ shifts so that people can be on hand in case of an emergency, then I suppose I can be on call 24x7, if they triple my salary to remunerate me for my time.
An emergency is by definition an extreme event that happens very rarely. Any company that pays 2nd or 3rd shifts just to have people on hand in case of an emergency is wasting money. If there is an emergency outside normal working hours you bring in your staff and pay them the appropriate amount of overtime. Now, if calling people in outside working hours is a regular occurrence for a company then that company needs to look into shifts, either as regular working hours or rotating on call shifts with appropriate compensation when you are on call.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This won't fix the problem. I have this problem now where my employer expects to on every other weekend be "available for on call" where I get paid per hour worked where someone calls me. The downside of this is that I have to be A: Somewhere I have cell phone reception. B: Within 30 mins of a computer I can VPN to the office with at any given time. Those two restrictions mean that I must restrict my movements during on call hours so I don't feel like it's actually time off but most of the time I am not compensated for that. It is an ongoing point of disagreement with my employer.
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.
Perhaps consider leaving. Jerks be jerks.
If you otherwise like the work and company, then perhaps you can write up a nice diplomatic and complementing letter explaining that you otherwise enjoy working there, but that your "home tether" requirement is not being fairly compensated in your opinion, because it limits your off-work choices.
Table-ized A.I.
The title and summary are nearly impossible to read and understand, holy cow.
It seems unambiguous to me: "Seoul Considers Messaging Ban After Work Hours" means that the citizens of Seoul got together after work (maybe in a bar) to consider a messaging ban.
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.
The way my company does it for my team is we have a rotation where we each cycle on-call for 2 weeks where we're expected to remain within signal range of a cell tower and within 30 minutes of either being able to login to the VPN or travel to the office itself. As compensation, we get paid $25 / day (in addition to our regular salary) just for holding onto the phone... and then if there's ever an issue off-hours we get paid for the time taken to solve the issue. If it's one of those things where we just need to kick off a normally automated task and review the output of that task to see if it ran, we are allowed to log the entire time it took for the task to run in 1 hr intervals. As an example, we get alerted that a task didn't run for whatever reason. We can login, log our start time, kick off the task and set up whatever alert needs to be created to let us know it's completed, and logoff (note: we do not log the end time yet). If we get the alert 10 minutes later that the task completed, we login again; check the results; log our end time if the results look good, and logoff knowing we're getting paid for a full hour extra. If the task runs for 3hrs and 1 minute...we get paid for 4 hours.
This method has helped to keep the team morale high, and while we dread having the phone, we take comfort in knowing that the rotation will take about a quarter to quarter and a half to get back around to us again after we complete our round, and we'll get bonus pay that makes it more than worth it.
Though I like this package very much (for obvious reasons) it does go way above my expectations. Whenever I interview for a company I always ask if on-call will be a requirement and what their compensation is. If they don't at least pay extra for the periods when you're expected to carry the oc phone it's an automatic walk... the level of compensation given for when an event actually occurs is negotiable but I will usually require some kind of time-based comp. If they want to say they'll pay me an extra hour a day just for being on call and that serves as a credit towards any events that may occur that day..fine, I'll go with that. I suppose it could kinda screw me if something happens at 23:01 and it takes me until 00:57 to get it sorted, but events should be happening so infrequently that such a thing shouldn't be a heavy inconvenience.
Being on call, means being paid because of said restrictions. Receiving a call means receiving at least 3 hours pay on top of that, to discourage pointless or rushed calls (where can I find x or y, where can i find the keys for z). If there are no fair rules, it sucks.