3 ms·

I have an 11 month old child. My work hours are all over the place. A law telling me I can't catch up on Slack when I'm up at midnight for unrelated reasons j

I have an 11 month old child. My work hours are all over the place. A law telling me I can't catch up on Slack when I'm up at midnight for unrelated reasons just makes my life worse. Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
> Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it. Because there are bosses out there who, if you don't meet their expectation of round the clock access to you, will fire you or PIP you out. Regulation will always have some edge cases where said regulation is suboptimal, but optimal over the aggregate. Your life might be worse, but more people's lives are improved. Having children myself, I understand and can relate to your situation, but also understand the value of setting employment boundaries using regulation. Constant off hours contact is legitimately harmful to worker wellbeing [1]. "The insidious impact of 'always on' organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit – increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries," says Becker. "Our research exposes the reality: 'flexible work boundaries' often turn into 'work without boundaries,' compromising an employee's and their family's health and well-being. Becker's research [2] is part of a growing body of work that is affirming the negative effects of an "always on" work culture. Around the world, several governments have begun to go as far as legislate laws allowing employees the freedom to not have to engage with work outside of official work hours." [1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-emails/55879/ https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em... (The right to disconnect: The new laws banning after-hours work emails) [2] https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 (Killing me softly: Electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being)
- jjk166 5y ago
  This is an example of regulating a poorly chosen proxy. If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. There are plenty of reasons why after hours messages might be useful and no one really has a problem with them on their own, it's other behaviors which are loosely correlated with it which are the issue. Yes you will always have edge cases, but we should strive to minimize those edge cases as much as possible. In the particular situation of "some people prefer work schedules outside the standard 9-5" it's not even a small edge case, nor an unintuitive one.
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    Some people would also prefer to drive on the other side of the road for their own legitimate concerns.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      Driving on the wrong side of the road directly causes collisions. Would you rather A) ban driving on the wrong side of the road and thus stop unwanted behaviour or B) leave driving on the wrong side of the road legal but ban british people from driving because british drivers are correlated with driving on the other side of the road? Option A is a well chosen proxy, option B is the poorly chosen proxy I am arguing against.
  - gjulianm 5y ago
    > If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. It's much more difficult to prove that a worker is being fired for not being available 24/7 when they company says they have other reasons, than to prove that your boss sent a message out of hours. Your proposal would be practically unenforceable.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      It doesn't matter how easily something is measured if it's not a useful measure. The difficulty of enforcing wrongful termination laws in a "right to work" environment is a separate issue, solved by better standards of evidence with clear guidelines.
      - gjulianm 5y ago
        No standard of evidence will solve the fact that you can't ever know the true motives of someone. If someone gets fired because their boss says it was for poor performance, you won't ever know that the thing that the boss cared for was the fact that the employee didn't respond to some slack messages. Find just enough evidence for plausible deniability and you're done. Also, the difficulty of proving the causes of termination will mean that employees will be discouraged to sue. On the other hand, if you ban out-of-hours messages, it's pretty easy to prove you received that message, so it's much easier to enforce. This happens with a lot of similar issues. For example, in my country it's illegal to ask in interviews about family situation, pregnancy, religion... The point is to stop hiring discrimination, but it's much easier to prove that the employer asked me about whether I wanted to have kids than to prove that the employer rejected me because I want to have kids.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

> Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it. Because there are bosses out there who, if you don't meet their expectation of round the clock access to you, will fire you or PIP you out. Regulation will always have some edge cases where said regulation is suboptimal, but optimal over the aggregate. Your life might be worse, but more people's lives are improved. Having children myself, I understand and can relate to your situation, but also understand the value of setting employment boundaries using regulation. Constant off hours contact is legitimately harmful to worker wellbeing [1]. "The insidious impact of 'always on' organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit – increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries," says Becker. "Our research exposes the reality: 'flexible work boundaries' often turn into 'work without boundaries,' compromising an employee's and their family's health and well-being. Becker's research [2] is part of a growing body of work that is affirming the negative effects of an "always on" work culture. Around the world, several governments have begun to go as far as legislate laws allowing employees the freedom to not have to engage with work outside of official work hours." [1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-emails/55879/ https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em... (The right to disconnect: The new laws banning after-hours work emails) [2] https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 (Killing me softly: Electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being)

jjk166 5y ago
This is an example of regulating a poorly chosen proxy. If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. There are plenty of reasons why after hours messages might be useful and no one really has a problem with them on their own, it's other behaviors which are loosely correlated with it which are the issue. Yes you will always have edge cases, but we should strive to minimize those edge cases as much as possible. In the particular situation of "some people prefer work schedules outside the standard 9-5" it's not even a small edge case, nor an unintuitive one.
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  Some people would also prefer to drive on the other side of the road for their own legitimate concerns.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Driving on the wrong side of the road directly causes collisions. Would you rather A) ban driving on the wrong side of the road and thus stop unwanted behaviour or B) leave driving on the wrong side of the road legal but ban british people from driving because british drivers are correlated with driving on the other side of the road? Option A is a well chosen proxy, option B is the poorly chosen proxy I am arguing against.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. It's much more difficult to prove that a worker is being fired for not being available 24/7 when they company says they have other reasons, than to prove that your boss sent a message out of hours. Your proposal would be practically unenforceable.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how easily something is measured if it's not a useful measure. The difficulty of enforcing wrongful termination laws in a "right to work" environment is a separate issue, solved by better standards of evidence with clear guidelines.
    - gjulianm 5y ago
      No standard of evidence will solve the fact that you can't ever know the true motives of someone. If someone gets fired because their boss says it was for poor performance, you won't ever know that the thing that the boss cared for was the fact that the employee didn't respond to some slack messages. Find just enough evidence for plausible deniability and you're done. Also, the difficulty of proving the causes of termination will mean that employees will be discouraged to sue. On the other hand, if you ban out-of-hours messages, it's pretty easy to prove you received that message, so it's much easier to enforce. This happens with a lot of similar issues. For example, in my country it's illegal to ask in interviews about family situation, pregnancy, religion... The point is to stop hiring discrimination, but it's much easier to prove that the employer asked me about whether I wanted to have kids than to prove that the employer rejected me because I want to have kids.