
Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email - ohjeez
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/would-the-right-to-disconnect-help-workers-in-the-city-that-doesnt-sleep-1804.html
======
jedberg
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.

~~~
greglindahl
So, as a CEO, if you have an employee who wakes up early and wishes to put in
a few hours early, you're OK with making that difficult by restricting the
hours during which emails can be sent? What about the employee who likes to
work for a while after putting his kids to bed?

I've had both kinds of employees, and I'm happy to facilitate their unusual
work hours. The employee with young kids would often leave in the afternoon,
and I was totally OK with that. His wife was a doctor and did not have
flexible hours. He took the kids to soccer games. And he was the most awesome
employee I’ve ever had the honor of managing.

~~~
Retric
Nothing prevents you from composing an email outside of business hours, but
not sending it.

In an actual emergency email is a terrible communication medium, thus no email
should ever be of a time critical nature.

~~~
greglindahl
As a manager, answering emails in my off hours enables others to do useful
work during their unusual hours. What you really want to attack is the
expectation for employees to respond when they are not working— something that
I do not expect.

------
williamscales
> 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.

~~~
sincerely
>If you want a law with teeth, prohibit employers from emailing workers
outside of work hours

This seems needlessly punitive for the same results. My boss works much later
hours than me and I don't really see a point in forcing them to send me emails
from the night before at 9AM when there'd be no penalty for me not responding
to evening emails anyways

~~~
cool-RR
You can just have the server delay the email until morning.

~~~
ggg9990
I worked at a company which was like this. All emails were delayed until the
hour to make sure you only got one interruption per hour. You could mark the
email as “high importance” to get it through immediately, as were emails from
external addresses.

~~~
noir_lord
I have that setup on evolution, when it's open it checks every 60 minutes for
new mail, I just leave it running on Workspace 4 (email/communication) and
forget about it.

If something requires responding to in <60 minutes..well that something
probably requires a phonecall.

I think people forget that email is meant to be asynchronous.

------
marssaxman
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
Please tell me where you work and how I can get a job there. Your work's
culture is very rare.

~~~
marssaxman
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.

------
peacetreefrog
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...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-
ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q)

~~~
awakeasleep
Wish I understood the pro-business slant of libertarianism.

As companies become more and more powerful it seems reasonable to ask why it's
the company's freedom that we protect rather than the individual's.

Surely one can see the company as governing our lives by making these rules,
therefore restricting our freedom.

~~~
raquo
For one, if you limit your definition of freedom to "freedom to do things" and
disregard "freedom from things", you end up being pro-organized-power, which
is essentially pro-business.

------
tathougies
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.

~~~
ewar-woowar
It's hard to ignore when it also goes to your phone. Also when the company
_expect_ a reply.

I have had HR routinely email me between 9 and 11 pm on Sunday nights as a
deliberate strategy to make me stressed/uncomfortable with the workplace. Some
people are trash and use technology as a weapon.

~~~
tathougies
I used to work in strategy consulting (Bain and company), so i am very
familiar with this type of pressure. I stayed with that for enough of a time
that I've learned my lesson

If you read my comment, one option I gave was simply leaving, which is what I
do in this case. After leaving Bain, if a company does this, I quit, and tell
HR the reason why. There are no second chances.

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

~~~
moate
[http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=34...](http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3458217&GUID=8930D471-5788-4AF4-B960-54620B2535F7&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search=disconnect)

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.

------
pfp
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
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
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.

~~~
moate
And that seems to be the direction legislation like this would be pushing
employers towards. The problem is, as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread,
that many people don't appreciate the idea that working 24/7/365 isn't what
most people want. If you do, that's cool, do you, but forcing that culture on
people makes problems which makes market regulations.

------
SmellTheGlove
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
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
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
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.

------
danielfoster
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
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-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-
angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions)

------
jbob2000
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.

------
duxup
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.

------
mc32
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
Jobs like that exist and you're welcome to take one. I prefer to be always
available; please don't try to outlaw it.

~~~
moate
Literally nobody is doing that. Go read that description. Employers can still
email you whenever they want, they just can't take any action against you if
you don't reply.

So it's super great that you want to be at your job's beck and call for
whatever your reasons, but I fail to see why slowing the creep of work into my
off-hours is bad?

~~~
jessriedel
You misinterpret. The point is not to be available out of the kindness of
one's heart, the point is to create value doing that and be compensated
accordingly (and hence, to be fireable or not as well compensated otherwise).

------
existencebox
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
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."

------
pasbesoin
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.

------
makecheck
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.

------
bcohen5055
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
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.

------
throwaway287391
> 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
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
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?

------
hokus
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)

------
dpeck
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?

------
KozmoNau7
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.

------
poster123
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.

------
jaclaz
Sideways related old thread, just in case:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14155118)

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

------
conanbatt
Time to buffer your emails.

------
ironjunkie
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
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.

------
moate
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
Most people who make salaries don't have to be paid overtime.

~~~
moate
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

