Y’know what? I got a phone call and an e-mail from work today at 6:05 AM, and I’m happy I did, because my job literally doesn’t work without those calls. I’m a substitute teacher, and we don’t usually know whether we’re going to be working or not until the morning of. Yes, that’s something of a special case, but the world is just full of special cases. Does this law address all of them?
In which case I guess you’ll have a lot more of your time since you’ll be out of a job.
Buzzfeed clarifies the story – No, France Did Not Make It Illegal To Answer Work Emails After 6 P.M.
Among other things –
– it’s not a law. It’s a negotiated term between employers and unions
– it doesn’t set a particular time of day
It says right there in the quote in the OP that this will affect around a million people in the digital and consultancy sectors. This isn’t a blanket law- it doesn’t even look like a law at all to me, just an agreement with the unions
It doesn’t need to. Like I already said, I very much doubt anybody will be checking up to make sure that you didn’t read any emails outside of the designated times. Nobody cares whether you did or not.
What legislation likes this does is help employees who are being unduly hassled and are trying to take action against the boss doing the hassling. Previously, it might have been hard for a tribunal to distinguish between normal workplace interaction and targeted harassment. Now it doesn’t matter about the context, a phone call or email outside the designated hours is inappropriate. Slam dunk.
For 99% of good managers that get on with their staff sending an email at 8pm won’t ever be a problem. For those bullies trying to harass staff, they know they can no longer get away with that specific behaviour.
I, for one, fail to see how sending someone an email after 6 PM constitutes “unduly hassling” them.
No, the idea is that employers will not be able to fire people who refuse to stare at their slaveberries while showering, shaving, wiping their asses, changing their babies’ diapers, having sex, farting in the bathtub or driving.
Note that the “outside 9-6” is not an absolute: office hours for each specific worker are defined in that worker’s contract (something most Americans don’t have).
BTW there are similar agreements between some major German companies/government departments and their respective works councils.
E.g. VW (Volkswagen): Corporate mail servers do not forward e-mails to corporate phones from 6.15 pm to 7 am
Daimler AG (Mercedes): Employees can opt to have incoming e-mail arriving during their vacations deleted automatically (e.g. sender gets a message to the effect of "Thank you for your e-mail. It was deleted automatically as I am on vacation until … , If the matter is urgent please contact …, else resend the mail after my vacation).
Federal Labour Ministry: Contacting employees who are on vacation is prohibited.
Other major companies with such policies are Puma and BMW.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
I work with coworkers on different continents and time zones. If we all didn’t take calls and answer email on off hours no work would get done.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for off-work-hours calls in certain careers and situations. There *are *real emergencies, and I don’t think most people would be extremely upset at a once-in-a-blue-moon urgent call. Where it becomes a problem is when a workaholic 80-hr-a-week kind of boss feels like all of his employees should be devoting as much time to the business as he is, so he decides that they have an obligation to drop everything and switch to work mode when he calls them. That’s the kind of thing that the French union agreement is trying to eliminate.
Now, I’m interested. But I asked around and only my boss had heard about this and what he had heard was that this information was published in some australian paper. So, quite similar to myself discovering it on the SDMB.
So, does anybody has a link to some French source about this? :dubious:
No doubt, I’m the same way. I work in the eastern time zone f the US and receive emails from Tijuana, Tokyo, London, China, Russia and Australia all around the clock. I don’t have to read them or reply to them all but I’m adult enough to know which ones are important enough to deal with immediately and which ones aren’t. And because of that I’m also adult enough to stand up for myself and not take any crap from co-workers when I come in late or decide to leave early. I haven’t worked more than 45 hours a week for years.
I love my job as it allows me freedom to be judged by my accomplishments and not by just showing up on time and sitting at a desk. If someone finds themself in such a job and can’t handle the pressure of always being on they should seek another position. I also don’t see a need for government to get involved in work issues like that.
Same here, first thing I heard about it. Then again, I’m not exactly Mister Finger on the Pulse of the Nation.
My employer does not permit working from home (or other remote locations) so the only place I access my work emails is from the computer on my desk. I can access them remotely from home, but since they don’t condone working at home, why should I check my emails? Quite simply, when I am in the office, I am at work. When I am at home, I am not at work and therefore whatever it is can wait.
Besides, they don’t pay me anywhere near enough to care about stuff out of hours.
If you click to Google News and put in something like ‘email France’ a whole lot of things come up.
Still don’t have a clue what this is all about, but from the linked article, it’s an agreement signed between an employer federation and unions, not a law.
So Buzzfeed is apparently better at journalism than The Guardian. 
Thanks for that. It also only applies to a few industries.
This new agreement seems silly and draconian. It’s ridiculous to think that it will make a difference. A bad boss will still be a bad boss. Plenty of people want to work odd hours. Let them.
I had an employee once who would put her kids to sleep and fall asleep with them. Then she’d wake up around midnight and work for an hour or two and send lots of emails. That was her schedule, and why should I tell her not to do that?
Let people do what they want. What a 19th century law in a 21st century world.
Plus, you know…
Cheese eating surrender monkeys.
Given it’s generally one bullshit hierarchy, you don’t think ‘the boss’ will like his free time free, as well?