Anyone tired of answering emails and calls from their boss after work may soon be protected by law in California.
A bill has been introduced in California legislature that would give employees the “right to disconnect” from their jobs during nonworking hours.
Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco first introduced the bill, Assembly Bill 2751 in February, which would allow employees to disconnect from communications from their employer during nonworking hours.
If passed, California would be the first state to create a “right to disconnect” for employees. Similar laws have already been enacted in 13 countries, including Australia, Argentina, Belgium, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and Spain.
What is going on that this is necessary? I’ve never been expected to be reachable outside my working hours.
I’ve been on call, but those are scheduled, and I got paid if anything happened. I can only think of a very few unscheduled calls, including one where I had to call in and didn’t even have to unmute, but you bet your ass I still counted that time on my timecard and got paid for it.
Salaried workers have no specific hours. Their employers own them.
EDIT: Meaning to say that they aren’t paid for hours worked, so there is nothing to lose and everything to gain from a money perspective for employers to get them to work long hours and call whenever.
Wait a second, you don’t have working hours in the US just because you’re receiving a salary? My contract states that I have 8h of work per day, 5 days a week, and that office hours are understood as 9 AM to 6 PM with 1h for lunch, and that’s that.
It depends on your agreement with your employer. Unless your employment contract specifically states hours for you to work during, there is no limit on when your boss can expect you to reply to your emails.
Of course, hourly non-salaried workers get paid by the hour, even though some hourly workers can still be expected to work ridiculous hours by their employers.
Can you imagine being on a global operations team in California? Looks like a bunch of job openings
It just means that employers will have to pay employees for the work they perform. I dont think there will be major changes. It will just require companies to better define the hours their employees are expected to be working.
Again, ops teams usually work way overtime. California is special because we don’t really have an overlapping working time with Asia or EU. This means we either have to not work a regular 9-5 time zone or the company is going to have to open a bunch of positions to make up for the difference.
Care to describe what you’re calling “ops” or do you think your company’s technobabble means something?
“Ops” means “Operations” and is far from technobabble. Ops could be everything from maintenance and security personnel to IT workers who keep business-critical systems running.
