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Emails While Commuting 'Should Count as Work', Researchers Say (bbc.com)
Commuters are so regularly using travel time for work emails that their journeys should be counted as part of the working day, researchers say. From a report: Wider access to wi-fi on trains and the spread of mobile phones has extended the working day, a study from the University of the West of England says. The study examined 5,000 rail passengers on commuter routes into London as wi-fi became more available. "I am a busy mum and I rely on that time," one commuter told researchers. The study, to be presented at the Royal Geographical Society on Thursday, found that 54% of commuters using the train's wi-fi were sending work emails. Others were using their own mobile phone connections for work emails.
Who cares what researchers say. What counts as work to a company is whatever the company says counts.
Do researches want to subtract time on slashdot during work?
Since knowledge workers are generally exempt employees (outside of contractors) then they're not going to be paid overtime for their emails.
But more importantly, what difference does it make? Who gets paid for every hour of work worked? So it means I work 70 hours in a week instead of 60. I'm still only getting paid for 40.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Most of what we do at jobs is make-work or wasted work. Send people home to get self-actualized instead.
Alternative Right.
Who doesn't do this? If you spend two hours on the train working, you spend 6 at work. It's always been like that, even before email and wifi.
OK, the premise (at least of the title and TFS) is just stupid. I mean, I do solution architecture in IT. Should they pay me for my time in the shower because I spent part of the time thinking about a solution for a work problem? That happens all the time. You can't quantify it - at least until we get plugged into the Matrix. So how far does this, "but it was work" go?
found that 54% of commuters using the train's wi-fi were sending work emails
So in other words, they're reading all your private emails. The price of "free"...
If I were hourly - sure.
I'm salary. That means I'm paid to get a job done with 40 hours as the minimum time commitment. It is understood that it will sometimes exceed that (off hours support, etc). The salary is an agreed-upon compensation for my skills and responsiveness, not an hourly equivalent.
*satire* So if I get a ticket for Texting while Driving do I submit the ticket to my employer to pick up the cost of the ticket?
And in the EU just travel in some cases is work time all ready
https://www.fastcompany.com/30...
Research time would be better spent trying to establish why employees would want to work while commuting knowing they won't be compensated for that.
One hypothesis to check in this research is whether 1. unpaid work during the commute increases the likelihood of promotion or even retention, and 2. employees perceive their situation as such.
What can the train's Wi-Fi see in an IMAP or SMTP connection past the STARTTLS?
Is the company telling you to check/respond/craft work emails during the commute? You are choosing to perform these actions. Using this logic, I will check my work email hourly at home throughout the evening so I can stay on the clock 16 hours a day....
If you can get paid to read emails on the train. But that is not going to fly at my company. They'd rather if you have so much work that you show up an hour early and pay you once you've reached the office.
If I'm being paid (and billed) by the hour then you bet I'm counting that time as work. If I'm exempt (salaried) then I do what must be done. If there is some hard limit on the number of hours that can be worked then I'll take "comp-time" at my earliest convenience.
just a ghost in the machine.
I've always counted it as work. I have one simple rule. Am I as productive during the commute as at the office.
Sometimes the answer is yes and others it is no. If I feel I'm not overly productive I do not account for it.
Where this really kicks in hard is business travel. If I'm flying intercity then I usually end up doing a ton of work at the airport, on the shuttle or train to and from and some times on the plane it self.
This attitude instantly changed a few things.
1. I travel to the office at different times than the majority. Which means I'm more productive. Less distractions.
2. I travel cheaper. Off rush travel is often cheaper by air and public transport. ( Depends on city ) Company loves this and so do I.
3. Stress levels drop.
My "work week" is actually closer to 40 hours than most and I'm far more productive in those hours than my colleagues that are stressed way out.
Here's my hypothesis: Wage increases and job security.
An old axiom about why buy the cow when you get the milf for free comes to mind...
Guess which one gets the raise. Guess who gets laid off when business is slow.
My guess would be neither and both respectively.
I would work on the bus and be just as productive from the bus as I was at my desk.
That must be nice or you must have had a fairly narrow work flow. For me working on a bus would be absolutely horrible for my productivity since I deal with a lot of paperwork and generally have three monitors in front of me for computer work. Plus it's a little hard to manage staff from a laptop on a bus.
So it would be an hour to work, 6 hours in the office, and an hour back.
That would get you fired rather quickly at most companies in the US since commuting time is not considered relevant. There are exceptions but not a lot of them.
Guess who gets laid off when business is slow.
All of them.
oh sorry, that's not a guess.
If youâ€(TM)re a consultant, you probably are overcharging for everything to begin with. Travel, food, etc... and the bitch of it is, you probably charge the customer for your time to gain the expertise they assumed you already had when you agreed to take the position.
If youâ€(TM) are salary, you have a job to accomplish and the boss is paying you for that. If you do that in 10 hours a week... we might want to find more responsibilities for you as itâ€(TM)s clear you are severely under utilized. If you need 60 hours a week, as a salary employee, you negotiated a fee to be paid to accomplish a job... well... thatâ€(TM)s your problem.
If you are an hourly employee, you probably are working at McDonalds or are a shift worker. While I am sure that shift workers such as nurses and doctors will sometimes work from the train or bus, the doctor is extremely well compensated for his time and should just do his job. Shift-nurses probably are in a much lower pay grade, but shift nurses generally work in places where their work related mails and such are part of their on-shift schedule.
This sounds like underpaid and under appreciated employees who work shit jobs for asshole bosses who have not placed them on salary trying to justify shorter office hours to make it to the daycare on time to pick up.
If you work for someone who knows you are a parent and knows you have to pick up and drop off and they are giving you grief over your hours, you need to leave the U.S. or the U.K. and move somewhere civilized.
Maybe more companies would be more inclined to allow remote work.
Those working moms want to count the time they spend emailing on the train to offset the number of hours less that they're in the office compared with their male colleagues, but the fact is those male colleagues are likely emailing on the train too, so it still won't help make up the difference. Only fix is to change the accepted fact that the mom is supposed to drop the kids off at school and start expecting half the dads to be doing it too. (More and more dads are doing it.)
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
If people know that they are only getting paid for 40 hours of work, why the heck do they do any unpaid work? It is an employee's market right now. If your employer expects you to do unpaid work tell them to fuck off and switch employers. There are no lack of jobs. Eventually employers will either stop asking for all that extra work, or actually begin paying for it.
Frankly, the main reason employers ask you to do a lot of nonsense after hours is precisely because they know it's free. If they had to pay for it, not to mention at overtime rates, they would leave you to enjoy your mornings/evenings to yourself. As it should be.
At least here for my state employer where I work, any time I'm doing email or thinking about my projects is work, just like a lawyer's "billable hours"
ANY contact outside of work hours - email, text, calls, outside of your eight hours should be billable, at least as a quarter hour, if not half an hour per each.
Or do you believe your upper management, that you exist solely for their use, and have no life (nor deserve one) of your own?
My company insurance covers me in case of accident going to/from work (in cases I was not purposely endangering myself or being reckless, of course).
It is considered work accident exactly like it happened in my working space.
The filtering you mention conceptually resembles sslstrip, which prompted HSTS. A mail user agent (MUA) might implement an analogous countermeasure against STARTTLS stripping by warning the user if STARTTLS to a particular server stops working:
MUA connects to mail server over one network.
STARTTLS works.
MUA records this fact.
MUA connects to same mail server over a different network.
STARTTLS fails.
MUA warns user that a mail server that once supported STARTTLS no longer does and drops the connection until further notice.
There's even a draft proposal called MTA-STS for a mail server to require STARTTLS for further connections.
Or the user could configure the MUA to connect on the alternate port that uses TLS from byte one: 465 for SMTP, 993 for IMAP, or 563 for NNTP.
My work and off work life are so mixed I don't even care. I
who needs slavery when we have people like you?
I bill for hours spent on email, regardless of where I do it, so yes, it is work.
It also means the time spent on personal social media accounts and emails while at work should not be counted as part of the work day.
Dilbert
Here's my time sheet, filled out in increments of fifteen minutes.
As usual, I coded the useless hours spent in meetings as "work," whereas the time I spent in the shower designing circuits in my mind is "non-work."
Interestingly, even the time I spend complaining about my lack of productivity is considered "work."
CAPTCHA cathode
I wonder, nowadays, how many workers actually need to change locations to work. Why not put all that investment in bullet trains and the like into the Internet. Then only a small number of people will need to be physically elsewhere.