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Work Emails After Hours Finally Banned in France (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
A new French law establishing workers' "right to disconnect" goes into effect today. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails. The goals of the law include making sure employees are fairly paid for work, and preventing burnout by protecting private time. French legislator Benoit Hamon, speaking to the BBC, described the law as an answer to the travails of employees who "leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash -- like a dog."
The BBC reports that France already has a 35-hour work week, while Fortune adds that many European companies have already taken steps to curtail after-work emails. "In 2012, Volkswagen blocked all emails to employees' Blackberries after-hours," and "Daimler took the step of deleting all emails received by employees while on vacation."
The BBC reports that France already has a 35-hour work week, while Fortune adds that many European companies have already taken steps to curtail after-work emails. "In 2012, Volkswagen blocked all emails to employees' Blackberries after-hours," and "Daimler took the step of deleting all emails received by employees while on vacation."
Americans really have no idea how hard they let their work fuck them in the ass. I work for a multinational corporation and last year when they rolled out the new time tracking system they had a conference call on its features. That's when the Americans all found out their German colleagues were required to work only a 7.5 hour day instead of 8. The system, designed by the Germans and presented to us by them, also had a cap of 10 hours a day you could enter. The first question from the Americans was what to do when you work more than 10. There was a long awkward pause while the German presenters tried to grasp the question and eventually suggested that you enter any hours past 10 on the weekend.
In meetings with the Germans they can't understand why no American ever takes more than two weeks of vacation in a row while they routinely take the entire month of August off. They have less hours, have better pay, vastly superior vacation time, vastly superior benefits, and they have job security unlike our right to work for less/fire at will states...but look Americans! There's some dude on food stamps buying a potato with MUNNY DA GUBMINT STOLE FRUM U!
I'm hourly and required to carry a work cellphone 24/7 despite not being paid to do so in any way
Can you really not find other work? That seems unlikely for a technical worker these days. To put up with 24/7 duty with no extra pay is not something you should put up with. You should demand extra compensation, or leave.
Sorely needed in the US...along with that 35 hour work week
I disagree. When I was younger I worked 50-80 hour (or longer) weeks. But the thing is, I enjoyed it, a lot. More than that it set up a great base for a career to follow, because I had essentially got an extra year or two of experience over people who worked "regular" hours, indeed probably 2x the experience over people who worked 35 hour weeks...
It's not like i never take time for vacation, then or now (sometimes a lot). But I don't think there is any value mandating a cap on possible work, I feel like that is the best way to ruin and country and economy and frankly, a whole generation of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is it becomes expected that you be working/in touch 24/7.
That happened to a friend of mine. HIs employer kept calling him out at all hours of the night so we just told him to ask to be paid to be on call. He came back and told us the answer was, 'sorry, no budget for that'. So we advised him that since his wife was giving him a hard time and he was thinking about quitting over this anyway he should just shut his work phone off when he left the office. It took about a week before there was a major emergency and the shit hit the fan. Hours upon hours of downtime, the upper management started riding lower management about what the fuck had happened. He gets called into a meeting with management and he tells them 'pas d'argent pas du Suiss' I'm not on call so I figured it's only fair to shut off the work phone. Next thing you know there is alluvasudden money in the departmental budget for keeping him on call. So come end of the month he checks his pay-slip, no pay for being on call so he goes and asks payroll what's wrong and they send him to the department head. It seems when they said that they had found money in the budget to pay him for being on call, what they meant to say, it was as of the following quarter but of course they expected him to be on call until then, sans pay. So he turns off his work phone again after work hours, shit hits the fan *again* and he finally gets his on-call money, paid retroactively. Give an employer an finger and they will devour your entire arm.