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Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email

123 points by ohjeez 9y ago

moate 9y ago
YAS! 100% behind things like this. There is no reason to expect employees to perform their normal jobs outside of normal work hours. If you want them working, pay them overtime.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Most people who make salaries don't have to be paid overtime.
  - moate 9y ago
    Right. And with this law, most people who make salaries won't have to respond to work outside of normal hours. So it seems like a rather short jump to the conclusion that if you wanted someone to be available via text/email at all hours...you'd need to set up some sort of compensation for their time. Maybe this isn't the specific definition of overtime, but I fail to see how that's not basically overtime
existencebox 9y ago
I'm curious about one specific part of TFA, namely "Workers who are on call 24 hours a day get to disconnect only on their days off and vacations." I know tech workers are already in an "interesting" position with mostly unpaid-overtime being the expectation. I don't however understand where the legality of that classification breaks down, and whether we would stand to benefit from the above, or if we should expect more employees to be simply reclassified. (On a broader tangent, with the various minimum wage and worker protection bumps certain states have taken over the last few years, I'd be very curious if anyone came across a good post-mortem of how those actually panned out with respect to employment rates and %s of employees in various classes; I know it's pretty well accepted that we've seen a significant growth in contracting/"gig" work (also exempt from protections per TFA) but I've been wanting for an evaluation as to the level of correlation with micro-events as opposed to broad trends of cost-cutting.)
- classichasclass 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure physicians would fall under the "on call 24 hours a day" criterion, too, whether or not they're explicitly "on call."
SmellTheGlove 9y ago
This is great and all, but NY is still an at-will employment state, right? Sure they wouldn't be able to fire you for _this_ specifically, but they wouldn't have to fish long to catch some other reason to let you go if they want to.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  I was under the impression the point of at will employment is that you don't need a reason to fire someone. That's why most companies don't give reasons, or if they do they're generic and meaningless: i.e. "this isn't a good fit... culture wise."
  - classichasclass 9y ago
    As a practical matter, though, you probably have to come up with some reason to prevent the employee filling in the blank with some sort of protected-class discrimination. "Culture fit" does sound nice and generic for that purpose.
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      Technically, you don't. Push comes to shove, employee would have to prove discrimination, which is near impossible. But if the company has a decent amount of assets, some enterprising lawyer can decide to be a thorn and say well the company might settle to make legal costs go away. Which is where personal improvement plans come in, so that if you are threatened with a discrimination lawsuit, the accuser knows they're not going to get anywhere so they won't waste your time.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Even in "at will" states (which is 49/50 US states, or 50/50 depending on how you interpret Montana's approach), there are some prohibitions on what companies can do. And the "we didn't fire this employee for (prohibited reason), we fired them for something completely unrelated" thing is not novel. State labor departments are extremely familiar with it.
mc32 9y ago
I really, really hope this gets adopted in some form or other across the country. Just about every service provider I talk to talks about enabling employees to work from everywhere, as a positive aspect, without any awareness of imposition. I'm elated we are looking to claw some of our own time me back. To have some definition between work life and home life. No more blurriness. Of course carve outs for vital 24x7 ops, with appropriate compensation, depending on characteristics. This always on call on duty nonsense is dehumanizing.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Jobs like that exist and you're welcome to take one. I prefer to be always available; please don't try to outlaw it.
  - mc32 9y ago
    You may volunteer, if you like but there should be no expectation or negative repercussions for people who do not engage in this behavior and managers should be advised against any implicit bias against non conformists.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      I would like to do the work and get paid for it. If you don't want a job like that, don't take one. The reasonable defense of sorts of restrictions is that workers are stuck in some sort of collective action problem; none of them want to work overtime, but they can't coordinate. But that argument is dead in the water if it can't account for different preferences.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Opinions like this enable the continual abuse of the American workforce.
    - cabaalis 9y ago
      I disagree. Opinions like this one allow people who want to make more money, impress employers and get noticed because of it, and therefore excel to achieve those goals. The unintended consequence of a rule like this will be that employers will move to limit liability by introducing technical barriers like are being discussed elsewhere on this thread. Therefore people who want to work more and be compensated for it will be technically prohibited from doing so.
williamscales 9y ago
> Under the proposed law, employers can send you whatever they want. They just can’t require you to read it or answer, and they can’t retaliate if you don’t. If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. As written, you won't be fired for not reading email, but you will be fired when you appear much less productive to your employer than those who do read their emails outside of work. On the other hand, as a tech worker, I've had good success with simply refusing to reply to emails or slack outside of work hours. The root of this problem is not that it's illegal to ask you to read your email outside of work, it's that folks love to feel important and aren't willing to set down their email. This law strikes me as excessive regulation that doesn't achieve a useful goal.
- adventured 9y ago
  > If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. It is curious they avoided doing the obvious with this, someone must have calculated the pushback from business interests would have blocked it. That said, you don't shift a culture overnight, and the style of work-culture in the US is more the problem than the laws (which will follow if/as the culture changes).
- prolikewhoa 9y ago
  Why did the workers allow this to happen? Why do we just simply give up more and more of our lives to give more profit to the corporation you work for? When are we going to stick up for our rights? It's not exactly a radical position. We did this.
  - gregjwild 9y ago
    Agreed. Another example of where folks in knowledge economy jobs need should join/found unions.
    - fitpolar 9y ago
      Another thread where we can talk about unionizing tech workers but nothing will get done about it. I mean, myself included. I wouldn't know where to even start with attempting to form some kind of country wide or global union effort.
jbob2000 9y ago
You always had the right to ignore after-work email, it was never the law that allowed this, only social pressure. The law isn't going to change the perception that if I answer this email, it will get me further along in my career. Even with this law, the person you are competing with for that promotion will still probably answer after-work email, so you have to as well.
peacetreefrog 9y ago
This is a great issue to view through the lens of economist Arnold Kling's "3 axis model" (1) which says people tend to view issues through three separate lenses: oppressed vs oppressor (liberals), freedom vs coercion (libertarians) and civilization vs barbarism (conservatives). It's pretty clear those in favor of the law view companies's as oppressing and exploiting their workers by making them read email after work to get ahead. Those against would say it's a question of freedom. Companies are free to make outside of 9-5 email part of the job description, and get rid of people who don't measure up. Workers are free to find jobs where that's not expected. Not sure the civ-barb axis really fits in that well here, but conservatives might view hard work and long hours as good traits we don't want to discourage, much less outlaw. https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling...
- lainga 9y ago
  Au contraire, it could be the height of secular barbarism to force us to work around the clock like those San Francisco liberals, without time for appreciating a good book, raising families, or attending Mass. EDIT: Or not, I'm just guessing...
  - peacetreefrog 9y ago
    Yes perhaps. I think the civilization vs barbarism axis is the one most most up in the air on this issue. Some conservatives might view the always plugged/everyone on their phone in culture as harmful and might be in favor of something like this. I know many religious Jewish people keep Shabbot, where they don't use tech for 25 hours. But I also think you could make the argument that the oppressed-oppressor axis is coming through a bit in the "force us to work around the clock" part of your comment.
- gregjwild 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with Kling's model, but that seems like a terribly reductionist model. It scarcely sums up the range of ontological perspectives in America right now, let alone anywhere else in the world, and especially let alone outside of the present context.
bcohen5055 9y ago
I work in a product development environment. We have a worldwide network of suppliers. At the beginning of this year our employer stopped reimbursing our monthly cell phone bill. When asked if we still should respond to emails form our phone both durring and outside of work hours we were reminded that although it is our choice to reply after work hours our bonus is contingent upon launching product on a timely schedule. Personally I enjoy being connected at all times as it maintains better relationships with engineers across the globe but ever since this decision was made I'm much more selective about what emails I reply to.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  This is something that really irks me. Of your employer expects you to use a phone in your work, he should damn well supply you with a phone and pay the subscription.
ataggart 9y ago
I'm not clear on why I should be prohibited from accepting more pay in exchange for being more available.
- jayess 9y ago
  Busybodies gonna busybody.
- moate 9y ago
  http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3458217&GUID=8930D471-5788-4AF4-B960-54620B2535F7&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=disconnect http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=34... Here's the legislation. It excludes "overtime", so you would be able to do this. The law is just creating requirement that you opt-in to extended availability, not forcing you to always opt-out.
tathougies 9y ago
Meh, I hate getting after-work e-mail, but I think it's ludicrous to outlaw it. If people don't want to respond to it, then don't. If that impacts your job, and limits your career, either accept that, or find another job. Personally, i've just left jobs that required me to respond to after-work or weekend e-mail, and found a better job.
- peatfreak 9y ago
  It gets a lot harder to have this attitude when you have a family to support. But meh to that.
  - tathougies 9y ago
    I do have a family to support; my wife stays home full-time too, and I'm the only one who works. We meticulously save up money so I can quit my job if I no longer like it. My wife and I prioritize convenience and a relaxed home environment over all other factors. We are prepared to live on /very/ little, and if I find in the future that I really don't like software engineering, I have been working on learning to build fine furniture (And have been somewhat successful!), so that remains an option for supplementing income. After working several jobs I really hated, we've decided to never become beholden to a company again. People pay you money if you do work that helps them. If you get this, then making money is straightforwards enough, and you don't need a whole lot to get by. The only place where this falls apart is medical costs. However, in my opinion, the fact that you can go bankrupt from medical costs is more an indictment of America's healthcare system and lack of universal health insurance, than it is a valid critique of my philosophy.
- moate 9y ago
  Markets need regulations. Otherwise children stay in mines and the Irish need not apply. Also, based on the fact that you're on HN, I'm going to assume that you're lucky enough to work in a field that currently has a surplus of career options that pay a living wage. For lots of people that's not the case. These types of laws are meant to prevent exploitation of labor in the 21st century where "the workplace" has been completely changed. It's not perfect, it leaves plenty of ways for people to continue to be exploited, but it helps stem the bleeding and pushes the culture a bit in the right way. Your view of "just go to the job tree and pick a new job" is cute but completely out of touch.
jedberg 9y ago
The culture of after hours email needs to change from the top down. If they want an effective law, they should make the law say that you can't send email to anyone who is below you in the org during their off hours, or outside of "normal business hours" or something to that effect. Employees were always allowed to ignore after work email, but their bosses most likely would not have promoted them vs someone who responds on weekends. As a CEO, I try to set a good example by not sending email after hours. I try not to reply to emails after hours, to make sure everyone knows that it's ok to not work after hours. Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too. The only way you'll fix this on a large scale is by forcing that top down approach. That being said, I'm not a huge fan of even more regulations, but I do see why they're sometimes necessary.
- jknz 9y ago
  There as rather simple technological solutions to achieve this company-wide: Configure your SMTP server so that any email sent after 8pm is only sent to the other party at 7am; with a similar rule during weekend. [I am not sure how to perform this in practice with common SMTP servers, but there is not technological barrier here] So employees can still "get work done" after hours, but they don't receive new tasks. In case of emergency, use the phone. NYState could implement this in law. Emails sent at night to employees that are off-duty (i.e., not explicitly paid for night hours) should be blocked until the next morning. Much easier to implement than GDPR :)
  - TylerE 9y ago
    Wouldn't that create it's own sort of tyranny in that it becomes about who can be a position to read and reply to email at 7AM?
    - jknz 9y ago
      I don't think so; (though I would set emails to be sent at 8am just to make sure :) The whole issue comes from an implicit expectation that employees read their email after hours because (1) they are likely awake until 11pm-12pm and (2) they always carry their smartphones with email capabilities (3) the task has to be done before the next morning. At 7am, employees are asleep so hopefully this implicit expectation of reading ones email will not transform into morning tyranny. Also, if the emails are received at 7am or 8am, the sender cannot expect the task to be completed before the morning but morning is already here. So managers will organize accordingly and stop feeling that it's OK to send tasks at 10pm to be completed by the morning.
throwaway287391 9y ago
> Everyone who doesn’t check their work email “just one more time” before turning in for the night, please raise your hand. Totally off-topic, but I see this sort of statement a lot and it's odd to me. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s at the latest. How many people that fall under the workaholic stereotype being portrayed by this kind of article are still deliberately "checking their email" in 2018? Seems to me that anyone who's this attentive to emails pretty much knows the minute they receive one because they get a push notification from either their smartphone or the inbox browser tab they have open.
- tamasnet 9y ago
  I'm "hourly attentive" to email, or maybe "convenience attentive" if I'm waiting in line or something. For me, turning on notifications for email would eliminate the distinction between email and chat. I understand some people use it that way, but I expect lots of folks keep the distinction.
  - throwaway287391 9y ago
    Right, but you presumably aren't one of the stereotypical anxious busybodies the article is appealing to with the sentence I quoted. Anyone like that wouldn't disable the on-by-default push notifications, I'd assume. What am I missing?
- danenania 9y ago
  For a developer there shouldn't normally be a need to check email that often (if good processes are in place), but if you're doing sales, support, fundraising, etc., then seeing and responding to incoming emails quickly can be very important. It's crazy how much difference in conversion rate you can see by responding to a lead in 5 minutes vs. even a few hours, or how much more forgiving customers are of problems when you respond very quickly.
marssaxman 9y ago
Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slack outside work hours, nor any of the other always-on practices which have supposedly become universal. I don't take my work laptop home unless I plan to work from home; on the rare occasions I've had a work phone, I've left it on my desk when I go home. I keep imagining that someday somebody is going to take issue with this, and then we'll get to have an interesting conversation about expectations - but nobody in management, anywhere I've worked, has ever talked about such practices as though they are expected, given me any hassle for being unavailable outside work hours, nor - so far as I can tell - noticed at all that I have continued to divide my life into work time and not-work time. I've been reading articles for years now where people talk about these sorts of expectations as though they have become universal, and yet I can't find any evidence that they actually exist in my own experience. It's confusing. Why do people believe this? Is this just not a tech industry thing, or perhaps is this just not a Seattle thing? Or is this something that has sort of collectively emerged in people's awareness without actually being real, and people just go along with it because they think everyone else is doing it, and they don't want to be the odd one out?
- fitpolar 9y ago
  Please tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's culture is very rare.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Not that rare, OP's description is exactly my work situation. I go in at 9, leave at 5 on the dot (+/- 15 minutes), no one contacts me outside of work, only the MD even has my mobile number. Boss actually gets annoyed if I work on stuff outside of work time. I think the secret is to find a decent none-tech place to work, everyone else works 9/5 so there is no expectation on me not to.
  - marssaxman 9y ago
    I am currently working at a little AI startup, which does have an unusually good culture, but I was talking about my overall experience across 20+ years in the West Coast tech industry, mostly in startups but also some larger places, including two of the Big 5. I have seen all kinds of cultural failures, certainly, but I've been watching out for this one, because I've been curious about how it was happening, so it surprises me that I haven't seen anyone in management doing anything to make it happen.
duxup 9y ago
I wonder what the "quality" of after work email is vs. work hours email... or communication that happens as an alternative to email such as talking to people. I often noticed that email I receive after hours gets noticeably more vague, sometimes unexpectedly demanding, less thought out, and at times lazy after hours. Like people are putting in the effort to send, but not think about it completely. Often I'd call someone the next morning and whatever they emailed me was out the window by that time and we'd be on to something else.
ironjunkie 9y ago
A libertarian view: I see jobs very simply as offer and demand. In tech for example, there is such a huge demand for engineers that you are can get away with a lot of things. For example a lot of my friends work at big tech companies and consciously decide to work 9 to 5 and never do any work (email or other) outside those hours. Some will decide to do it and as dictated by the law of offer and demand, they will be rewarded slightly more than the ones that don't. I see nothing wrong with that, and it is a prioritization choice and tradeoff that everyone needs to do. Now, on the other side, there will be jobs that have very little demand and a lot of offers, which will make people compete for the lowest wage and the highest availability. There must be some sort of regulation here, but I don't think that a blanket regulation against emails outside of working hours is a good idea.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  The problem is that the power balance is shifted hard towards the employers. Were it not for regulations, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and people would still apply for the jobs. It would be a race to the bottom, as every employer would follow suit.
dpeck 9y ago
So, what to use for asynchronous messages if I’m finishing up something and want my colleague (up or down) to see when they start work in the morning?
danielfoster 9y ago
This is a terrible piece of legislation. Supposedly emergencies are exempt, but what if you have a remote team and need someone to check in once or twice during the evening? There are a lot of situations in multi-office / distributed teams where a response from one-time zone is the only bottleneck for moving forward. The penalties are harsh and arbitrary: A fixed $250 fee paid to the employee plus a $1,000 civil fine for each violation. Government workers are notably excluded from the bill. City Councilman Rafael Espinal Jr. got the idea for his bill from France, which isn't exactly a great model for a city that wants to attract business.
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  Government workers being excluded from this bill is classic. Reminds me of the unions in LA who pushing a $15 per hour minimum wage, then wanted to be exempt when it got passed. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...
pfp 9y ago
I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue? Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.
- moate 9y ago
  It's a law being proposed in the US. It's a problem here. Just out of curiosity, where are you from? The proposed law doesn't prohibit you from sending emails. It prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who don't respond to the emails. It doesn't prohibit employees from responding to emails. It also allows your job to define when your "normal work hours" are, so if you work at 2 AM and that's when your office is open, you can expect people there and responding It's super great that your work experience does not intrude upon your life. For many people in the US it does, and they feel like they cannot do anything except accept this intrusion. This law allows them to, like you, not touch their work emails when they're not at work.
  - pfp 9y ago
    Originally Finland, currently working in a multinational based in Germany. Same experiences in both countries, I've never felt any "soft" pressure of the kind described in this thread that'd call for such legislation. On call hours are controlled by legislation though, at least in Finland. Compensation for being on call isn't just "included in your regular salary"; employers are required to pay 50% (IIRC) on top of that just for the fact that you're able to work (read: sober and not innawoods) during a certain defined time period, and if you're actually called in, salary for the actual overtime hours worked. Obviously this gets pretty expensive for employers though so they tend to make optimal use of their on call people, but at least the rules are pretty clear.
makecheck 9y ago
This might be better phrased as “maximum work hours per day”, where every work-related activity counts toward those hours. Some jobs, unfortunately, naturally have weird hours (because the company has worldwide offices, is in a special industry or whatever). You wouldn’t, for instance, get very far responding to disasters if you were not in a position to even find out about them most of the time. The problem isn’t so much the “after-work” activity but what “work” means. If my job required responses to issues at weird hours, I would expect to reduce hours at the not-weird times. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways though, otherwise workers never have any reasonable way to truly disconnect, which is stress.
conanbatt 9y ago
Time to buffer your emails.
paxys 9y ago
How about they make a law which will have real effects vs. just lip service -- ban unpaid overtime.
poster123 9y ago
This is silly. If passed, your boss may not be able to explicitly punish you for not responding to after-hours email, but he can certainly make decisions about promotions and discretionary bonuses based on whether you responded to after-hours emails, without saying why. All this does is encourage people to be devious.
hokus 9y ago
For people who sleep at work to be on call I hear it is usual to pay them a lower than usual rate (40% ish) for every hour of availability which (depending on the time) will change into a [much] higher than usual rate if they have to do anything. It seems fine to be paid 40% for the other 16 hours and 2 times 24 in the weekend. At 40% these 128 hours would be 99.2 hours. I would jump out of bed at 3 am to do whatever you want. (well almost)
KozmoNau7 9y ago
A couple of months ago, I just started leaving my work laptop and phone in my locker at work. There is absolutely no reason for my employer to contact me at home after hours, and they know it. I'll stay late if I need to, but all work happens at the office, not at home. I'll only make an exception and work from home if I need to go to the dentist or something that day.
jaclaz 9y ago
Sideways related old thread, just in case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118
pasbesoin 9y ago
Many such companies can well afford to take on more employees. They just don't want to. So, you have to draw a legislative line in the sand. Redefine the "level playing field" -- and its boundaries -- within which they compete. In order to give people their lives back. We see enormous displays of wealth, at the high end of compensation. It doesn't all have to go to the individuals who find ways to squeeze their employees ever harder. Make them spend some of it on more employees. P.S. Yeah, employees aren't simply "fungible". But there needs to be some balance against "always on" employment. Also, at the lower end of the workforce, against last-minute varying and fragmented scheduling -- keeping employees essentially at your beck and call while paying them only for the hours you actually call them in. Destroying family time and planning, sleep schedules, etc.

123 points by ohjeez 9y ago

YAS! 100% behind things like this. There is no reason to expect employees to perform their normal jobs outside of normal work hours. If you want them working, pay them overtime.

jessriedel 9y ago
Most people who make salaries don't have to be paid overtime.
- moate 9y ago
  Right. And with this law, most people who make salaries won't have to respond to work outside of normal hours. So it seems like a rather short jump to the conclusion that if you wanted someone to be available via text/email at all hours...you'd need to set up some sort of compensation for their time. Maybe this isn't the specific definition of overtime, but I fail to see how that's not basically overtime

existencebox 9y ago

I'm curious about one specific part of TFA, namely "Workers who are on call 24 hours a day get to disconnect only on their days off and vacations." I know tech workers are already in an "interesting" position with mostly unpaid-overtime being the expectation. I don't however understand where the legality of that classification breaks down, and whether we would stand to benefit from the above, or if we should expect more employees to be simply reclassified. (On a broader tangent, with the various minimum wage and worker protection bumps certain states have taken over the last few years, I'd be very curious if anyone came across a good post-mortem of how those actually panned out with respect to employment rates and %s of employees in various classes; I know it's pretty well accepted that we've seen a significant growth in contracting/"gig" work (also exempt from protections per TFA) but I've been wanting for an evaluation as to the level of correlation with micro-events as opposed to broad trends of cost-cutting.)

classichasclass 9y ago
I'm pretty sure physicians would fall under the "on call 24 hours a day" criterion, too, whether or not they're explicitly "on call."

SmellTheGlove 9y ago

This is great and all, but NY is still an at-will employment state, right? Sure they wouldn't be able to fire you for _this_ specifically, but they wouldn't have to fish long to catch some other reason to let you go if they want to.

jdoliner 9y ago
I was under the impression the point of at will employment is that you don't need a reason to fire someone. That's why most companies don't give reasons, or if they do they're generic and meaningless: i.e. "this isn't a good fit... culture wise."
- classichasclass 9y ago
  As a practical matter, though, you probably have to come up with some reason to prevent the employee filling in the blank with some sort of protected-class discrimination. "Culture fit" does sound nice and generic for that purpose.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Technically, you don't. Push comes to shove, employee would have to prove discrimination, which is near impossible. But if the company has a decent amount of assets, some enterprising lawyer can decide to be a thorn and say well the company might settle to make legal costs go away. Which is where personal improvement plans come in, so that if you are threatened with a discrimination lawsuit, the accuser knows they're not going to get anywhere so they won't waste your time.
ubernostrum 9y ago
Even in "at will" states (which is 49/50 US states, or 50/50 depending on how you interpret Montana's approach), there are some prohibitions on what companies can do. And the "we didn't fire this employee for (prohibited reason), we fired them for something completely unrelated" thing is not novel. State labor departments are extremely familiar with it.

mc32 9y ago

I really, really hope this gets adopted in some form or other across the country. Just about every service provider I talk to talks about enabling employees to work from everywhere, as a positive aspect, without any awareness of imposition. I'm elated we are looking to claw some of our own time me back. To have some definition between work life and home life. No more blurriness. Of course carve outs for vital 24x7 ops, with appropriate compensation, depending on characteristics. This always on call on duty nonsense is dehumanizing.

jessriedel 9y ago
Jobs like that exist and you're welcome to take one. I prefer to be always available; please don't try to outlaw it.
- mc32 9y ago
  You may volunteer, if you like but there should be no expectation or negative repercussions for people who do not engage in this behavior and managers should be advised against any implicit bias against non conformists.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    I would like to do the work and get paid for it. If you don't want a job like that, don't take one. The reasonable defense of sorts of restrictions is that workers are stuck in some sort of collective action problem; none of them want to work overtime, but they can't coordinate. But that argument is dead in the water if it can't account for different preferences.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Opinions like this enable the continual abuse of the American workforce.
  - cabaalis 9y ago
    I disagree. Opinions like this one allow people who want to make more money, impress employers and get noticed because of it, and therefore excel to achieve those goals. The unintended consequence of a rule like this will be that employers will move to limit liability by introducing technical barriers like are being discussed elsewhere on this thread. Therefore people who want to work more and be compensated for it will be technically prohibited from doing so.

williamscales 9y ago

> Under the proposed law, employers can send you whatever they want. They just can’t require you to read it or answer, and they can’t retaliate if you don’t. If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. As written, you won't be fired for not reading email, but you will be fired when you appear much less productive to your employer than those who do read their emails outside of work. On the other hand, as a tech worker, I've had good success with simply refusing to reply to emails or slack outside of work hours. The root of this problem is not that it's illegal to ask you to read your email outside of work, it's that folks love to feel important and aren't willing to set down their email. This law strikes me as excessive regulation that doesn't achieve a useful goal.

adventured 9y ago
> If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers outside of work hours. It is curious they avoided doing the obvious with this, someone must have calculated the pushback from business interests would have blocked it. That said, you don't shift a culture overnight, and the style of work-culture in the US is more the problem than the laws (which will follow if/as the culture changes).
prolikewhoa 9y ago
Why did the workers allow this to happen? Why do we just simply give up more and more of our lives to give more profit to the corporation you work for? When are we going to stick up for our rights? It's not exactly a radical position. We did this.
- gregjwild 9y ago
  Agreed. Another example of where folks in knowledge economy jobs need should join/found unions.
  - fitpolar 9y ago
    Another thread where we can talk about unionizing tech workers but nothing will get done about it. I mean, myself included. I wouldn't know where to even start with attempting to form some kind of country wide or global union effort.

jbob2000 9y ago

You always had the right to ignore after-work email, it was never the law that allowed this, only social pressure. The law isn't going to change the perception that if I answer this email, it will get me further along in my career. Even with this law, the person you are competing with for that promotion will still probably answer after-work email, so you have to as well.

peacetreefrog 9y ago

This is a great issue to view through the lens of economist Arnold Kling's "3 axis model" (1) which says people tend to view issues through three separate lenses: oppressed vs oppressor (liberals), freedom vs coercion (libertarians) and civilization vs barbarism (conservatives). It's pretty clear those in favor of the law view companies's as oppressing and exploiting their workers by making them read email after work to get ahead. Those against would say it's a question of freedom. Companies are free to make outside of 9-5 email part of the job description, and get rid of people who don't measure up. Workers are free to find jobs where that's not expected. Not sure the civ-barb axis really fits in that well here, but conservatives might view hard work and long hours as good traits we don't want to discourage, much less outlaw. https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling...

lainga 9y ago
Au contraire, it could be the height of secular barbarism to force us to work around the clock like those San Francisco liberals, without time for appreciating a good book, raising families, or attending Mass. EDIT: Or not, I'm just guessing...
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  Yes perhaps. I think the civilization vs barbarism axis is the one most most up in the air on this issue. Some conservatives might view the always plugged/everyone on their phone in culture as harmful and might be in favor of something like this. I know many religious Jewish people keep Shabbot, where they don't use tech for 25 hours. But I also think you could make the argument that the oppressed-oppressor axis is coming through a bit in the "force us to work around the clock" part of your comment.
gregjwild 9y ago
I'm not familiar with Kling's model, but that seems like a terribly reductionist model. It scarcely sums up the range of ontological perspectives in America right now, let alone anywhere else in the world, and especially let alone outside of the present context.

bcohen5055 9y ago

I work in a product development environment. We have a worldwide network of suppliers. At the beginning of this year our employer stopped reimbursing our monthly cell phone bill. When asked if we still should respond to emails form our phone both durring and outside of work hours we were reminded that although it is our choice to reply after work hours our bonus is contingent upon launching product on a timely schedule. Personally I enjoy being connected at all times as it maintains better relationships with engineers across the globe but ever since this decision was made I'm much more selective about what emails I reply to.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
This is something that really irks me. Of your employer expects you to use a phone in your work, he should damn well supply you with a phone and pay the subscription.

ataggart 9y ago

I'm not clear on why I should be prohibited from accepting more pay in exchange for being more available.

jayess 9y ago
Busybodies gonna busybody.
moate 9y ago
http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3458217&GUID=8930D471-5788-4AF4-B960-54620B2535F7&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=disconnect http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=34... Here's the legislation. It excludes "overtime", so you would be able to do this. The law is just creating requirement that you opt-in to extended availability, not forcing you to always opt-out.

tathougies 9y ago

Meh, I hate getting after-work e-mail, but I think it's ludicrous to outlaw it. If people don't want to respond to it, then don't. If that impacts your job, and limits your career, either accept that, or find another job. Personally, i've just left jobs that required me to respond to after-work or weekend e-mail, and found a better job.

peatfreak 9y ago
It gets a lot harder to have this attitude when you have a family to support. But meh to that.
- tathougies 9y ago
  I do have a family to support; my wife stays home full-time too, and I'm the only one who works. We meticulously save up money so I can quit my job if I no longer like it. My wife and I prioritize convenience and a relaxed home environment over all other factors. We are prepared to live on /very/ little, and if I find in the future that I really don't like software engineering, I have been working on learning to build fine furniture (And have been somewhat successful!), so that remains an option for supplementing income. After working several jobs I really hated, we've decided to never become beholden to a company again. People pay you money if you do work that helps them. If you get this, then making money is straightforwards enough, and you don't need a whole lot to get by. The only place where this falls apart is medical costs. However, in my opinion, the fact that you can go bankrupt from medical costs is more an indictment of America's healthcare system and lack of universal health insurance, than it is a valid critique of my philosophy.
moate 9y ago
Markets need regulations. Otherwise children stay in mines and the Irish need not apply. Also, based on the fact that you're on HN, I'm going to assume that you're lucky enough to work in a field that currently has a surplus of career options that pay a living wage. For lots of people that's not the case. These types of laws are meant to prevent exploitation of labor in the 21st century where "the workplace" has been completely changed. It's not perfect, it leaves plenty of ways for people to continue to be exploited, but it helps stem the bleeding and pushes the culture a bit in the right way. Your view of "just go to the job tree and pick a new job" is cute but completely out of touch.

jedberg 9y ago

The culture of after hours email needs to change from the top down. If they want an effective law, they should make the law say that you can't send email to anyone who is below you in the org during their off hours, or outside of "normal business hours" or something to that effect. Employees were always allowed to ignore after work email, but their bosses most likely would not have promoted them vs someone who responds on weekends. As a CEO, I try to set a good example by not sending email after hours. I try not to reply to emails after hours, to make sure everyone knows that it's ok to not work after hours. Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too. The only way you'll fix this on a large scale is by forcing that top down approach. That being said, I'm not a huge fan of even more regulations, but I do see why they're sometimes necessary.

jknz 9y ago
There as rather simple technological solutions to achieve this company-wide: Configure your SMTP server so that any email sent after 8pm is only sent to the other party at 7am; with a similar rule during weekend. [I am not sure how to perform this in practice with common SMTP servers, but there is not technological barrier here] So employees can still "get work done" after hours, but they don't receive new tasks. In case of emergency, use the phone. NYState could implement this in law. Emails sent at night to employees that are off-duty (i.e., not explicitly paid for night hours) should be blocked until the next morning. Much easier to implement than GDPR :)
- TylerE 9y ago
  Wouldn't that create it's own sort of tyranny in that it becomes about who can be a position to read and reply to email at 7AM?
  - jknz 9y ago
    I don't think so; (though I would set emails to be sent at 8am just to make sure :) The whole issue comes from an implicit expectation that employees read their email after hours because (1) they are likely awake until 11pm-12pm and (2) they always carry their smartphones with email capabilities (3) the task has to be done before the next morning. At 7am, employees are asleep so hopefully this implicit expectation of reading ones email will not transform into morning tyranny. Also, if the emails are received at 7am or 8am, the sender cannot expect the task to be completed before the morning but morning is already here. So managers will organize accordingly and stop feeling that it's OK to send tasks at 10pm to be completed by the morning.

throwaway287391 9y ago

> Everyone who doesn’t check their work email “just one more time” before turning in for the night, please raise your hand. Totally off-topic, but I see this sort of statement a lot and it's odd to me. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s at the latest. How many people that fall under the workaholic stereotype being portrayed by this kind of article are still deliberately "checking their email" in 2018? Seems to me that anyone who's this attentive to emails pretty much knows the minute they receive one because they get a push notification from either their smartphone or the inbox browser tab they have open.

tamasnet 9y ago
I'm "hourly attentive" to email, or maybe "convenience attentive" if I'm waiting in line or something. For me, turning on notifications for email would eliminate the distinction between email and chat. I understand some people use it that way, but I expect lots of folks keep the distinction.
- throwaway287391 9y ago
  Right, but you presumably aren't one of the stereotypical anxious busybodies the article is appealing to with the sentence I quoted. Anyone like that wouldn't disable the on-by-default push notifications, I'd assume. What am I missing?
danenania 9y ago
For a developer there shouldn't normally be a need to check email that often (if good processes are in place), but if you're doing sales, support, fundraising, etc., then seeing and responding to incoming emails quickly can be very important. It's crazy how much difference in conversion rate you can see by responding to a lead in 5 minutes vs. even a few hours, or how much more forgiving customers are of problems when you respond very quickly.

marssaxman 9y ago

Nobody has ever asked me to routinely check my work email outside work hours, nor to subscribe to work email on my personal phone, nor to stay logged in to slack outside work hours, nor any of the other always-on practices which have supposedly become universal. I don't take my work laptop home unless I plan to work from home; on the rare occasions I've had a work phone, I've left it on my desk when I go home. I keep imagining that someday somebody is going to take issue with this, and then we'll get to have an interesting conversation about expectations - but nobody in management, anywhere I've worked, has ever talked about such practices as though they are expected, given me any hassle for being unavailable outside work hours, nor - so far as I can tell - noticed at all that I have continued to divide my life into work time and not-work time. I've been reading articles for years now where people talk about these sorts of expectations as though they have become universal, and yet I can't find any evidence that they actually exist in my own experience. It's confusing. Why do people believe this? Is this just not a tech industry thing, or perhaps is this just not a Seattle thing? Or is this something that has sort of collectively emerged in people's awareness without actually being real, and people just go along with it because they think everyone else is doing it, and they don't want to be the odd one out?

fitpolar 9y ago
Please tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's culture is very rare.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Not that rare, OP's description is exactly my work situation. I go in at 9, leave at 5 on the dot (+/- 15 minutes), no one contacts me outside of work, only the MD even has my mobile number. Boss actually gets annoyed if I work on stuff outside of work time. I think the secret is to find a decent none-tech place to work, everyone else works 9/5 so there is no expectation on me not to.
- marssaxman 9y ago
  I am currently working at a little AI startup, which does have an unusually good culture, but I was talking about my overall experience across 20+ years in the West Coast tech industry, mostly in startups but also some larger places, including two of the Big 5. I have seen all kinds of cultural failures, certainly, but I've been watching out for this one, because I've been curious about how it was happening, so it surprises me that I haven't seen anyone in management doing anything to make it happen.

duxup 9y ago

I wonder what the "quality" of after work email is vs. work hours email... or communication that happens as an alternative to email such as talking to people. I often noticed that email I receive after hours gets noticeably more vague, sometimes unexpectedly demanding, less thought out, and at times lazy after hours. Like people are putting in the effort to send, but not think about it completely. Often I'd call someone the next morning and whatever they emailed me was out the window by that time and we'd be on to something else.

ironjunkie 9y ago

A libertarian view: I see jobs very simply as offer and demand. In tech for example, there is such a huge demand for engineers that you are can get away with a lot of things. For example a lot of my friends work at big tech companies and consciously decide to work 9 to 5 and never do any work (email or other) outside those hours. Some will decide to do it and as dictated by the law of offer and demand, they will be rewarded slightly more than the ones that don't. I see nothing wrong with that, and it is a prioritization choice and tradeoff that everyone needs to do. Now, on the other side, there will be jobs that have very little demand and a lot of offers, which will make people compete for the lowest wage and the highest availability. There must be some sort of regulation here, but I don't think that a blanket regulation against emails outside of working hours is a good idea.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
The problem is that the power balance is shifted hard towards the employers. Were it not for regulations, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and people would still apply for the jobs. It would be a race to the bottom, as every employer would follow suit.

dpeck 9y ago

So, what to use for asynchronous messages if I’m finishing up something and want my colleague (up or down) to see when they start work in the morning?

danielfoster 9y ago

This is a terrible piece of legislation. Supposedly emergencies are exempt, but what if you have a remote team and need someone to check in once or twice during the evening? There are a lot of situations in multi-office / distributed teams where a response from one-time zone is the only bottleneck for moving forward. The penalties are harsh and arbitrary: A fixed $250 fee paid to the employee plus a $1,000 civil fine for each violation. Government workers are notably excluded from the bill. City Councilman Rafael Espinal Jr. got the idea for his bill from France, which isn't exactly a great model for a city that wants to attract business.

peacetreefrog 9y ago
Government workers being excluded from this bill is classic. Reminds me of the unions in LA who pushing a $15 per hour minimum wage, then wanted to be exempt when it got passed. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...

pfp 9y ago

I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue? Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.

moate 9y ago
It's a law being proposed in the US. It's a problem here. Just out of curiosity, where are you from? The proposed law doesn't prohibit you from sending emails. It prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who don't respond to the emails. It doesn't prohibit employees from responding to emails. It also allows your job to define when your "normal work hours" are, so if you work at 2 AM and that's when your office is open, you can expect people there and responding It's super great that your work experience does not intrude upon your life. For many people in the US it does, and they feel like they cannot do anything except accept this intrusion. This law allows them to, like you, not touch their work emails when they're not at work.
- pfp 9y ago
  Originally Finland, currently working in a multinational based in Germany. Same experiences in both countries, I've never felt any "soft" pressure of the kind described in this thread that'd call for such legislation. On call hours are controlled by legislation though, at least in Finland. Compensation for being on call isn't just "included in your regular salary"; employers are required to pay 50% (IIRC) on top of that just for the fact that you're able to work (read: sober and not innawoods) during a certain defined time period, and if you're actually called in, salary for the actual overtime hours worked. Obviously this gets pretty expensive for employers though so they tend to make optimal use of their on call people, but at least the rules are pretty clear.

makecheck 9y ago

This might be better phrased as “maximum work hours per day”, where every work-related activity counts toward those hours. Some jobs, unfortunately, naturally have weird hours (because the company has worldwide offices, is in a special industry or whatever). You wouldn’t, for instance, get very far responding to disasters if you were not in a position to even find out about them most of the time. The problem isn’t so much the “after-work” activity but what “work” means. If my job required responses to issues at weird hours, I would expect to reduce hours at the not-weird times. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways though, otherwise workers never have any reasonable way to truly disconnect, which is stress.

conanbatt 9y ago

Time to buffer your emails.

paxys 9y ago

How about they make a law which will have real effects vs. just lip service -- ban unpaid overtime.

poster123 9y ago

This is silly. If passed, your boss may not be able to explicitly punish you for not responding to after-hours email, but he can certainly make decisions about promotions and discretionary bonuses based on whether you responded to after-hours emails, without saying why. All this does is encourage people to be devious.

hokus 9y ago

For people who sleep at work to be on call I hear it is usual to pay them a lower than usual rate (40% ish) for every hour of availability which (depending on the time) will change into a [much] higher than usual rate if they have to do anything. It seems fine to be paid 40% for the other 16 hours and 2 times 24 in the weekend. At 40% these 128 hours would be 99.2 hours. I would jump out of bed at 3 am to do whatever you want. (well almost)

KozmoNau7 9y ago

A couple of months ago, I just started leaving my work laptop and phone in my locker at work. There is absolutely no reason for my employer to contact me at home after hours, and they know it. I'll stay late if I need to, but all work happens at the office, not at home. I'll only make an exception and work from home if I need to go to the dentist or something that day.

jaclaz 9y ago

Sideways related old thread, just in case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118

pasbesoin 9y ago

Many such companies can well afford to take on more employees. They just don't want to. So, you have to draw a legislative line in the sand. Redefine the "level playing field" -- and its boundaries -- within which they compete. In order to give people their lives back. We see enormous displays of wealth, at the high end of compensation. It doesn't all have to go to the individuals who find ways to squeeze their employees ever harder. Make them spend some of it on more employees. P.S. Yeah, employees aren't simply "fungible". But there needs to be some balance against "always on" employment. Also, at the lower end of the workforce, against last-minute varying and fragmented scheduling -- keeping employees essentially at your beck and call while paying them only for the hours you actually call them in. Destroying family time and planning, sleep schedules, etc.