Australia is instituting no-contact rules with your manager, and will impose stiff penalties on violators.
Earlier this year, the country introduced legislation that gave workers what many pine for: the ability to ignore their boss after clocking out.
The law, which was passed in February and came into effect on Monday, covers what is otherwise known as “the right to disconnect.” Now, millions of Aussie workers’ phones might as well be swimming with the weird overgrown Australian fishes when they unplug. In this newly unveiled workforce landscape, most employees can’t be punished for not responding to their bosses outside of their hours.
Employers can still reach out past an employee's workday, but don’t expect them to text back. That’s because the legislation “protects employees who refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable,” according to press materials from Australia's workplace tribunal, Fair Work Commission (FWC).
The FWC is set to further rule on what disputes are unreasonable based on factors that include, but are not limited to, the nature of employment, why contact is being made, and if an employee is paid for overtime.
If a worker is found to be needlessly having their line blown up, the FWC can issue fines of up to 19,000 Australian dollars for an individual employee and or up to 94,000 Australian dollars for a company, per Reuters. Across the water, that’s equal to almost $13,000 for managers and $63,700 for a guilty company.
Australia isn’t the only country that has recently tried to help employees maintain their work-life boundaries. In 2017, France announced the right to disconnect, and wasn’t kidding around, as a pest-control employer was slapped with a 60,000-euro fine just one year later for not following the law.
Since then, such legislation has gained traction in parts of South America and elsewhere in Europe. In the shadow of the pandemic, as remote work became more common, these rules became all the more prevalent and urgent. While employees might not have the same strict hours, their schedules are fuzzier and sometimes result in even longer workdays than before. In short, the boundaries were being eroded.
And in the U.S., overtime pay has been chipped away at to the point that employees now put in an average of nine unpaid hours in overtime each week, per a 2021 ADP survey. The nation has no “right to disconnect” rules in place, though legislation has been introduced recently in California.
Reaching out is perhaps simpler than before with the advent of Zoom, Slack, and all the corporate accouterments that give a little ding, which creates the opposite of a Pavlovian response in an office worker. And it’s simply a modern phenomenon that needy bosses have your number.
"It's so easy to make contact, common sense doesn’t get applied anymore," Michele O'Neil, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, told Reuters. "We think this will cause bosses to pause and think about whether they really need to send that text or that email."
She deemed the recent enactment of the law “a historic day for working people,” though not everyone is jumping for joy, especially those who represent employers.
“The ‘right to disconnect’ laws are rushed, poorly thought out, and deeply confusing,” the Australian Industry Group said in a statement circulated by the AFP, warning that employees would be confused about scheduling extra shifts after work hours.
Either way, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is likely satisfied on this Australian winter day.
“What we are simply saying is that someone who isn’t being paid 24 hours a day shouldn’t be penalized if they’re not online and available 24 hours a day,” he said back in February.
