You’re not really being fair though.
What computers did or did not do to your free time is one thing…
Pagers, cell phones and now smart phones are your problem.
For the record, computers do save time. Just one quick, off the top of my head example… I can get orders on my website that take me 10-20 seconds to print out…orders that I would have been on the phone with the customer for 10 minutes to take.
I’m not being fair? Fair to whom? Do you mean I’m not being honest?
We can do more in a day and do it faster. But by the same token we are expected to do more, so we don’t get the extra leisure time. We do get other advantages though, like easy communication with friends, and Skyrim. Maybe it’s a wash.
Pages, cell phones, smart phones, pdas, tablets, they’re all ‘computers’ in the broader sense.
In other words, you have no idea what kinds of conditions people other than you have to deal with and you don’t care to find out before expressing an opinion on what they might or might not need.
Close enough.
We’re so brainwashed in this country that its no surprise to see how many clueless people jump in to defend harmful management practices and lack of employee options than to consider just for a second that happier and healthier employees are better overall for businesses. They must either be these overbearing bosses themselves or completely swallow the tripe big business has been feeding them
And clearly, the solution to that problem is to ban employers from communicating with their employees with one medium of communication which is New and therefore Evil.
We need this in the US where “salaried” = “on call and available 24/7”
The law as described doesn’t prohibit employers from sending emails after hours. It bans employees from looking at them. Presumably employers will be obliged to fire those who do.
I’m glad France is implementing this first. There are legitimate concerns for the employer and employees to work out. It’s going to take some give and take to make it work fairly for both sides. I’d guess there wouldn’t be any criminal penalties against employers. It’s a civil matter. Perhaps a fine levied by the Dept of Labor? Punitive penalties would seem reasonable for large scale offenders.
All they are trying to do is define after hours responsibilities between an employer and their employees. It’s a gray area. Technically you owe your boss nothing after quitting time. Our grandfathers and fathers didn’t have any way to be reached except for a land line at home. Cell phones and computers changed that 20 years ago. Now if you are a team player then you better be accessible after hours. Promotions and performance reviews depend on it. But, the rules are fuzzy and vary from company to company. A good boss may rarely intrude on their employees outside office hours. A bad boss may make it a daily habit.
The French are simply trying to define worker’s after office hours rights. Something that is overdue in the modern digital age.
Yeah, I’m not sure what is so hard to understand about this.
Bosses are still going to be able to reach their employees at night, and if bosses have good working relationships with their employees then there will be no problems with sending or reading emails at night, there is not going to be any email poilice monitoring the sent times of emails.
What legislation like this does is give a protection to those getting harassed by their bosses, its basically giving them a “headshot” should they bring a dispute against their manager to HR or to an industrial tribunal. Previously harrassment was something that might have been hard to quantify to a third party, but now you can just point to the date stamp on an email and prove that the boss acted inappropriately.
I’m very much in favor of employers allowing a decent work/life balance, and agree that in too many jobs that balance is completely out of whack. But an actual law banning work e-mails after 6 strikes me as draconian overkill.
Americans are workaholics and all you have to do is go to Europe for vacation to notice.
Which is what makes this pointless and arbitrary. If an employer is so demanding that he expects his employees to make their services available 24 hours a day, then not being able to send them an email isn’t going to stop him.
If the boss cannot email or phone the employee, then what else is he going to do?
Sounds awesome.
I used to show up at my employees’ houses when I needed to talk to them and they weren’t answering the phone.
Christ, are you serious? If my boss was coming to my house after hours because I wasn’t answering his calls, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t been to work for a week and he was worried, I would be filing all kinds of harassment claims with HR. Do you not see how intimidating that is? Did you pay these employees for the time you took out of their personal lives outside of their work day?
I don’t care if the building is ablaze and I’m the only one who knows where the fire extinguisher is kept. My time is my time.
mmm
With all due respect, most bullying bosses are not going to start showing up at peoples houses. Its one thing to pick up the phone and call an employee to give them grief, quite another to actually travel out of your way to do it. Sure, it may have happened to some people, but that just shows that a tiny minority are idiots not that this legislation will be ineffective.
I grew up in the 70s in a house with no landline. My dad had it removed in the mid 60s as 90% of all calls seemed to be from work with questions that could usually have waited until the next day. He was head of a department and people wanted to run crazy ideas past him at odd hours. He wanted his life work balance back and did it the hard way. An answer phone would probably have been easier but they were rare in the uk in those days. Luckily he retired long before smartphones took over.