Workplace: The right to be left alone
“Just imagine: You end your workday at 6 p.m. and when the boss Slacks you at 8 p.m., you ignore them,” said Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. Not only that: That boss “could face fines” for not respecting your “right to disconnect.” For a lot of workers, it sounds like a fantasy. But employees in California could have such rights enshrined into law. A Democratic assemblyman from San Francisco, Matt Haney, proposed new legislation earlier this month “that would require a public or private employer to ‘establish a workplace policy that provides employees the right to disconnect’” from workplace communications during nonworking hours. Haney says the idea is based on a “better work-life balance” law recently passed in Australia, and similar practices in “at least a dozen other countries.” It’s time that workers in the United States got relief from “the 24/7 workplace,” too.
We desperately need this legislation, because “always-on culture” is literally making us sick, said Chris Morris in Fast Company. The inability to disconnect has been linked to “chronic stress and emotional exhaustion.” But workers fear getting “overlooked for promotion” even more than they fear wrecking their health. Haney’s bill “does make exceptions for emergencies and organized labor,” allowing collective bargaining to take precedence. And it’s not that workplaces can never ping workers after hours, they just have to “explicitly detail” ahead of time that workers are needed. Evidence from European right-to-disconnect laws seems to be “relatively positive,” said André Spicer in The Guardian. Employees say they “feel more in control of their work,” which has led to “higher job satisfaction, better work-life balance,” and fewer “health issues such as headaches, stress, and anxiety.” This law is salvation for people like me who “find it difficult to stop themselves” from working all the time.
Indeed, “businesses should make sure that employees know they are not expected to be available 24/7,” said Lívia de Bastos Martini in Newsweek. But what freedom means for workers is “flexibility,” not a “one-size-fits-all” policy that makes every company create a rigid schedule. No doubt there are bad bosses who exploit their workers, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. And then “those bosses tend to lose the best workers.” Receiving emails after-hours “is the flip side of the more flexible work arrangements” that workers say they want. They have “more freedom to pick up their children from school,” and in exchange “they are sometimes expected to respond to important emails while at their kids’ soccer games.” It’s interesting that this bill comes out of California. Has Haney “ever been to Silicon Valley, where 9-to-5 working hours are far from the norm?”