Comment by toomuchtodo
4 years ago
> Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it.
Because there are bosses out there who, if you don't meet their expectation of round the clock access to you, will fire you or PIP you out. Regulation will always have some edge cases where said regulation is suboptimal, but optimal over the aggregate. Your life might be worse, but more people's lives are improved.
Having children myself, I understand and can relate to your situation, but also understand the value of setting employment boundaries using regulation. Constant off hours contact is legitimately harmful to worker wellbeing [1].
"The insidious impact of 'always on' organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit – increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries," says Becker. "Our research exposes the reality: 'flexible work boundaries' often turn into 'work without boundaries,' compromising an employee's and their family's health and well-being.
Becker's research [2] is part of a growing body of work that is affirming the negative effects of an "always on" work culture. Around the world, several governments have begun to go as far as legislate laws allowing employees the freedom to not have to engage with work outside of official work hours."
[1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em... (The right to disconnect: The new laws banning after-hours work emails)
[2] https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 (Killing me softly: Electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being)
This is an example of regulating a poorly chosen proxy. If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. There are plenty of reasons why after hours messages might be useful and no one really has a problem with them on their own, it's other behaviors which are loosely correlated with it which are the issue. Yes you will always have edge cases, but we should strive to minimize those edge cases as much as possible. In the particular situation of "some people prefer work schedules outside the standard 9-5" it's not even a small edge case, nor an unintuitive one.
You are not fired for that, you are fired for responding slower than the other candidate. Employers have to chose all the time. Who to promote? Who gets the shit task? Who will fly to the tropical resort?
You end up with millions of individual struggles with boundaries set by need/urgency, ability to say no, how much of a dick the boss is etc etc
In NL we have some law for a sector where people need to sleep on their shift while still on call. They get some small hourly compensation for those hours. When called their normal shift starts which has a minimum duration. After working for the maximum number of hours per day/week someone else will have to take over. Perhaps an exception like that could work.
Something like 25% of the normal hourly rate for being available. (for example 4 hours after each shift (20h) and 12 hours in the weekend (24h) for 12 hours extra pay) When called it is considered a minimum duration shift of 3 hours, hours beyond 8 or after 18:00 at overtime rate. The 3 hours are removed starting with the last work day of the week and the first of the next.
This is not a situation unique to after hours messages. The workplace is full of instances where an employer can discriminate against an employee in small but meaningful ways, you need robust employee protections, not a series of questionable legal hacks.
Replace responding slower with say being a different skin color. If a white and a black employee are equal on meaningful metrics but one gets to go on all the fun trips while the other is consistently given the shit tasks, that's obviously a problem, but you can't simply avoid the situation where the problem might present itself. You need structures in place so that employees can identify that they're being mistreated, notify someone with the power to fix the situation, confirm that the problem has actually been solved, and escalate if not; all without fear of retaliation. That is tough to do, but it doesn't make it any less necessary. Once you have that system in place, it is the logical way to deal with all forms of mistreatment. Then there is no need for special exceptions which substitute one rigid restriction for another.
Some people would also prefer to drive on the other side of the road for their own legitimate concerns.
Driving on the wrong side of the road directly causes collisions. Would you rather A) ban driving on the wrong side of the road and thus stop unwanted behaviour or B) leave driving on the wrong side of the road legal but ban british people from driving because british drivers are correlated with driving on the other side of the road?
Option A is a well chosen proxy, option B is the poorly chosen proxy I am arguing against.
> If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal.
It's much more difficult to prove that a worker is being fired for not being available 24/7 when they company says they have other reasons, than to prove that your boss sent a message out of hours. Your proposal would be practically unenforceable.
It doesn't matter how easily something is measured if it's not a useful measure.
The difficulty of enforcing wrongful termination laws in a "right to work" environment is a separate issue, solved by better standards of evidence with clear guidelines.
2 replies →