Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

Is your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you've left for home? 

Australian employees can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a new "right to disconnect" law designed to curb the creep of work emails and calls into personal lives.

The new rule, which came into force on Monday, means employees, in most cases, cannot be punished for refusing to read or respond to contacts from their employers outside work hours.

Supporters say the law gives workers the confidence to stand up against the steady invasion of their personal lives by work emails, texts and calls, a trend that has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the division between home and work.

"Before we had digital technology there was no encroachment, people would go home at the end of a shift and there would be no contact until they returned the following day," said John Hopkins, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology. 

"Now, globally it's the norm to have emails, SMS, phone calls outside those hours, even when on holiday."

Australians worked on average 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, according to a survey last year by the Australia Institute, which estimated the monetary value of the labour at   A$130 billion ($88 billion).

The changes add Australia to a group of roughly two dozen countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America, which have similar laws. 

Pioneer France introduced the rules in 2017 and a year later fined pest control firm Rentokil Initial 60,000 euros ($66,700) for requiring an employee to always have his phone on.

Rachel Abdelnour, who works in advertising, said the changes would help her disconnect in an industry where clients often have different working hours.

"I think it's actually really important that we have laws like this," she told Reuters. "We spend so much of our time connected to our phones, connected to our emails all day, and I think that it's really hard to switch off as it is."

REFUSALS MUST BE REASONABLE

To cater for emergencies and jobs with irregular hours, the rule still allows employers to contact their workers, who can only refuse to respond where it is reasonable to do so. 

Determining whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia's industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission (FWC), which must take into account an employee's role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.

It has the power to issue a cease and desist order and, failing that, levy fines of up A$19,000 for an employee or up to A$94,000 for a company.

But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added.

"The laws came literally and figuratively out of left field, were introduced with minimal consultation about their practical effect and have left little time for employers to prepare," the group said on Thursday. 

The president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Michele O'Neil said the caveat built into the law meant it won't interfere with reasonable requests. Instead, it will stop workers paying the price for poor planning by management, she said.

She cited an unidentified worker who finished a shift at midnight, only to be texted four hours later and told to be back at work by 6 am.

"It's so easy to make contact, common sense doesn't get applied anymore," she said. 

"We think this will cause bosses to pause and think about whether they really need to send that text or that email."