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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 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?
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.
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.