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

This isn't some Indian specific thing.

Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces management of the nursing home to find ways to cut expenses until there's nothing left to cut except stuff directly related to resident care, safety, etc. Families see the writing on the wall and move their relatives out which accelerates the demise of the nursing home and it has to shut down (or is shut down, by the county/state.) Then the PE firm bulldozes the building and sells the property (which is what they really wanted.)

The US suffered a massive toxic fire in Ohio that destroyed a big chunk of the town and left a huge area heavily poisoned because a private equity firm bought the railroad and was squeezing it for every penny, and despite plenty of warnings by union officials and experts, the FRA did nothing and then...boom. Wheel bearing seized, train derailed, town polluted by hundreds of thousands of pounds of incredibly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride.

https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7198354503823...

Precision railroad scheduling means:

- insanely strict rules about when engineers can request time off even for family medical emergencies, and sick days (so you have train engineers and other staff working while sick as dogs. Totally safe! Really stressed out employees, too - and stress means mistakes.) RR unions tried to strike twice. First congress and then and Biden bitch-slapped them back to work with a "compromise" that was still oppressive as hell because the economic disruption from the trains not running was more important. All because the railroads want to cut the number of employees down as low as possible so there aren't available engineers to replace sick ones, and they don't want delays while replacement engineers head out to trains that had to be left somewhere because the engineer was sick.

- dramatically reducing the time rolling stock maintenance crews have to inspect a car for problems - from three minutes to a minute and a half. Not only does this save labor, it means those maintenance crews don't find as much stuff wrong which takes a car out of service and costs money for the repair...woo, saving more money!

- reducing the number of employees per train; I believe it's currently two, and they're trying to push the FRA into allowing them to run one employee per train.

- increasing train lengths to reduce labor costs by moving more cars per people they have to pay. This increases the chances of derailments, and also causes other problems, like slower brake response time (the longer the train, the longer it takes for a pressure reduction in the brake line to make it to the end of the train, though I believe some end-of-train devices can be set up to remotely release brake pressure.)

- reducing track crews and time allocated to track maintenance so the tracks are more available and maintenance costs are lowered.

Keep in mind locomotive engineers are paid a median wage of $35/hour with a 10/90th percentile spread of $28/$44. These aren't enormous sums of money they're saving by going to one person on the train, particularly since it will be a lower-paid employee who is removed.

The crash was caused by overheating bearings which caused a wheelset to seize and derail the train.

It gets worse. The railroad pushed to have tanker cars intentionally burned, lied to the public, and turns out it was likely just because burning off the chemicals was cheaper and faster than a proper cleanup. Sources: https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion/video/7247656170347... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...

Hilariously, the EPA, the railway, and "independent scientists" all declared the area safe but EPA employees visiting the sites became sick in ways similar to how residents were being affected.

The railroad companies responded to public and congressional furor by saying they'd self-regulate (!) better, and join a program similar to the FAA's close-call incident reporting system. Only one railroad has joined that system, and all but one raiload saw an increase in derailments in the following year.

The PE firms know their maintenance and staffing cuts are causing increasing problems and will destroy the railroad companies. They don't care. They're milking the railroad companies for every dime they can squeeze, leaving them in tatters from all the deferred maintenance and repairs. These companies are responsible for moving massive amounts of cargo around the country, and when they fall apart, it will be a national crisis, and the federal government will have to step in and bail the companies out because they're 'Too Big To Fail.' And the PE firms that own trucking companies will see record profits...

I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.

Being a jerk extends all around.

As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist.

Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.

Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.

Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on.

Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse.

Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on.

Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on.

Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you.

Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.)

Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not.

For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.

Corporations are a form of “slow” AI - this is literally a war against the machines

I always like analogies, eg:

Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it.

I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.

The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more.

imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability.

Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.

Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.

Normalize it now; take advantage of it later when there is some sort of benefit, however short-term/sighted it may be.

The invisible hand of the market does not make shitty people with power become less shitty people with power.

Employees benefit from calls out of hours. How? The employer is able to offer better service to customers, and make more money, and the employee can negotiate a higher salary from the more profitable business. Employees who are inflexible cannot offer the same level of service to their employer and its customers; they'll on-average be paid less and measures like this increase production costs, making goods and services slightly more expensive.

This law reduces the extent to which flexible employees can add (and extract, via hight salary!) value, and the extent to which customers receive timely service.

your business shouldn't exist. What kind of take is this?

Your take was worse

In Tech consulting, you can pass of all your regulations and cost to your client.

In fact consulting thrives exactly because of government overreach.

Startups are complete opposite of Consulting

While I support his new law, more rules do act as a barrier to entry / competition for new / smaller businesses. Larger companies can more easily adhere to increasingly complex employment rules than smaller ones.

The new law protects people from being bothered by micromanagers during off hours, but reduced market competition keeps people stuck with a shitty boss, and reduces their chances to get a raise.

That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks.

It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.

That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.

Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.

Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination).

The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US.

I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.

I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them.

That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.

Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company.

I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.

Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

This is probably closer to the billing of on call staff than just "overtime".

For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.

Surveillance of employees is obviously banned anyway.

No need to speculate, we can check if such situation indeed takes place in Switzerland.

"the crud app you support fell over" is not an emergency.

I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed to learn that situations impacting business-critical operations would be considered emergencies.

The assumption that Australia just outlawed the concept of having an on-call rotation is not supported by the article.

The article says requiring an employee to be on-call 24/7 for general purposes would indeed be illegal.

There was another example that someone could not be required to come in for a surprise shift with only a few hours of notice overnight.

But completely eliminating planned on-call rotations is not part of the goal.

The CEO might argue their wellbeing is at risk if they don't receive the bonus for reaching their quarterly targets.

What stops my employer from potentially disciplining or firing me is first of all, that I am good at what I do, and second that I negotiate from a position of strength.

If my employer wants me to work off hours, I mean maybe I will, if I don't have anything going on, and I'll take some time the next day where I won't work as compensation for doing that, I won't ask permission.

If I do have something going on, I'll say, "Can't do that. Have something going on". They're fine with it. They're reasonable people. Why would I work for unreasonable people? I would work for someone else.

If they actually did fire me? OK, maybe I look for another job, but probably I'm retired. I saved my money. I negotiate from a position of strength.

Wait, can an employer fire you even if you didn't make a fault? What country are you in?

That's unrealistic. Managers who are unhappy with workers ignoring emails will find a reason to fire them, not promote them, or give them a smaller bonus.

I'm no lawyer, but I am an Australian and know the hoops you need to jump through in order to fire a full time employee.

An employer who is prepared to put in writing that you will be fired for not working unpaid overtime (responding to email) is in for bad time.

This is important, right here; healthy boundaries. The best time to set them up is right at the start, too. I've had 3 employers that privided me with a phone and laptop because the jobs involved travel, but I made very clear that work hours are work hours, so when I am off the clock, so are those devices. The respected that each time because the expectations were negotiated upfront, instead of waiting for one party to get ticked off and trying to pivot from that.

The teacher situation is strange. One the one hand, they often do seem to work outside of school hours on lesson prep and marking. On the other hand, they generally don't work during school holidays (12 weeks/yr).

Also, given that most school days here are ~9am to ~3pm, I wonder how much of that "after hours" work actually falls within the standard 40hr work week.

This isn't addressing unpaid hours, just the expectation than your boss or coworkers can communicate with you after hours. Unpaid hours is already illegal. How to enforce that in the education system without it collapsing is the open question.

I would like to see that happen, however, the current available guidance from FWC is worded very with a vast deal of of flexibility in it, and is highly open to interpretation. A manager may, in theory, decide any person responsible for any task may be contacted outside of hours. I've not seen anything truly restrictive.

I work for FAANG and have had one page

literally a page? with a pager?

Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.

That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).

I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.

The upside to not including such a thing seems pretty low. Maybe people save a few seconds not reading it? The downside seems quite high if you actually want people to understand your expectations about working hours. The signature may not mean much to someone who has been working for a long time but it could matter more for someone who is just starting their first job, or who has come from a quite different working environment, for example.

I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.

That depends entirely on if you ask permission before you interrupt another person.

“I … love to be interrupted”

Can you elaborate on this?

On behalf of humanity I ask you to please stop interrupting us.

Well that depends on your ability to self-regulate!

Do you constantly interrupt people and prevent them from doing work? If someone says they are busy and need a few minutes, do you ignore them and continue to interrupt what they do? Do you get angry if someone can't drop what they are doing to cater to your impulse?

Do your co-workers feel like working with you is like working with a child?

That is what my children do to me, and that is what "children in adult bodies" do in the workplace.

I'll try to explain it a different way:

I once had a manager who, after working with for 6-8 months, gave me the impression of "working for a child."

He would interrupt me all day for very trivial matters, and insist that I drop what I'm working on to address some email that just came in. (And what I was working on was from email that came in yesterday, that I dropped what I was working on yesterday to start...)

Any time I started any task that required any significant concentration, I'd start to panic that I'd be interrupted before the task was complete. (And if you understand concentration, you realize that you just can't pick up an interrupted task where you left off.)

---

Where it came to a head was, late one Friday afternoon, I realized I needed to cherry-pick or revert something in Git. At the time, I was a bit of a novice to Git. I skimmed an article on how to do what I needed to do in Git, decided it would take me ~10 minutes, and that I'd leave when I was done.

No sooner did I make it through the first paragraph did my manager interrupt me with a question. I answered it, and tried to find where I was reading (in the article that explained what I was trying to do). Then the guy next to me interrupted me with a technical question. The two of them continued, ping-ponging each other, me being stuck trying to read a paragraph, until I was able to construct one single command.

Then my manager pulled me into his office. I saw that he was putting together a presentation, and I spent 10 minutes answering his questions.

I thought I was done and could complete my ~10 minute task, but no. After I constructed the 2nd Git command, my manager and the guy next to me resumed ping-ponging me with questions.

Finally there was a lull, and I started constructing the 3rd git command. My manager comes up behind me, and in a rather condescending tone, said to me: "What are you doing here? It's a long weekend, go home!"

I responded, "I'm just trying to complete a 10-minute task before I go home, but I keep getting interrupted!"

My manager didn't apologize. He grunted, and then ran out of the door, like a child caught making a mess, but not owning up to it.

---

This manager, BTW, is why laws in the linked article exist. He once "forgot" to tell me he wanted me to work on a Saturday. I had plans so I ignored his Saturday morning call. Thankfully he was fired (or quit, it was ambiguous) about a month or two later.

---

So, are you like my old manager, constantly interrupting someone, and not having the emotional intelligence to apologize or to pace yourself? Or, do you think before you interrupt, give people a chance to pause what they are doing, and pace yourself so you aren't monopolizing others' time?

I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality.

I was a polite, agreeable person from an Irish Catholic family who spent 12 years working for Israeli tech companies. I am now so good at interrupting people and talking over them in meetings that it’s hurting my post Israel career.

The law won't make a difference for us, but it will probably make a difference to the super-market employees being phoned at 6am and asked to take on an extra shift today.

So, hiding true intentions and needs is better? Why is regulation not to force companies to be clear that you may be expected to be flexible with your corp comunication before signing the contract?

Paid overtime is covered in my contract (with rates detailed etc.), as is leave entitlements (and even how long I can be expected to work without a break). I suspect my contract is not unusual in Australia.

I don't think that's true. I'm in EU and I've allowed engineers to shift their working hours based on personal circumstances - like start remotely at 7am and finish at 3PM. I also encourage engineers to take the time they need for life stuff - kids school run, doctor, physio, sick aunt, whatever - because ultimately we measure the outcome of their work, and not the sum of hours worked.

For the office space - do you mean popping into the office at odd hours, like evenings or weekends? I'd probably be encouraging my engineers to talk to me about why they need to do it and not enjoy their non-working hours. If the work is too much, we solve for that. If they're going all in on something they love, I'll want to make sure they're not on a path to maybe burning-out.

Everything in context.

The culture extends to self-employed people to an extent, but it can be hard to set boundaries for yourself when you are building your own thing.

I've been in business for 7 years and fully self-employed for 4 years. Last week was my very first vacation without my laptop.

Help them out by scheduling the email to be sent during business hours?

That's what paper is for. Not email.

some people work at night and on sunday ... i didn't know that means i'm not allowed to sleep. thanks for letting me know.

that meant extremely early or late hours for me.

Especially if you had asked deliberate questions to establish work-life-balance and they'd withheld this, I personally wouldn't have just agreed to doing it without discussion of extra remuneration. Despite it clearly being a big deal for you, if you don't provide at least some pushback, it won't even be on their radar as an issue that's causing you pain.

Maybe if it's very occasional, say once a month, it's not too bad to do it. If it's every week, it'll significantly impact your life. If it's every day, or worse several times per week but unpredictable, then your life is being severely disrupted without compensation of that fact.

I remember once, a company ordered us all to work a month of 12-hour days (which itself is a symptom of bad project management, but that's a different discussion). At the meeting when we were told this, lots of people who were worried about losing their jobs just looked unhappy but said nothing. I knew I could find another job easily enough, so I brought up overtime pay. The company really didn't like it - and in fact threatened me later, but there was nothing they could really do, as they weren't in a position to let people go. The manager's reply was that they didn't want to pay overtime because they were worried that people would game it for extra money. I very firmly told them in this meeting (this was still the same meeting) that people didn't actually want to be there any longer than necessary - they wanted to go home to their wives and kids, and fortunately a few of the previously silent people added things like "my wife always complains whenever I have to do overtime". The outcome was that we had another meeting the next day where we were told that the overtime was voluntary and we'd be paid our normal salary. Nobody volunteered. The day after, the offer was increased to 1.5x salary. A couple of people volunteered. Even at the final overtime rate of 2x salary, there were still a few people who said that their personal time with the family was more important than the extra money. The company finally understood that people's time is precious.

In your case, I would simply start a discussion about sharing the responsibility for the out of hours work. Say you can provide detailed instructions, and be available by phone for the first couple of times to provide verbal help if they have any difficulties. At first, they might try to unload it onto someone else who doesn't complain, but you should still push for it to be shared across the wider team, maybe on a rota if it's really essential and with a bonus each time. You might find you have someone who needs the money and volunteers to do extra. And if the managers themselves ever find themselves having to do the process, you can be sure they will hate it, and very quickly find a way of getting the work done at another time in the week instead.

Sometimes, you can rationalise it as part of the nature of the job. My last two jobs have been UK based but working with US teams, but even just working a time-shifted day of 10am-6:30pm still causes me to have to turn down lots of evening events with friends because I simply cannot get there in time for a 7pm start. I really hate this aspect of the job, but in this case I knew the situation coming into it, and my daily rate is high enough that I consider it to be worth it.

Even if I wanted to, finding a new job is not an easy task and it's exhausting.

I know it's always easy to say, but you don't have to do anything you think is unreasonable. There may be repercussions to that, and I can understand the fear many people have for losing their job, but silently putting up with things that cause you stress or pain just means that the situation never gets addressed.

For most people, I'd suggest the single best thing you can possibly do in your life is to save enough money for a 3-6 month emergency buffer, so if you were to lose your job it's not such a big deal, as long as you can find another job in that timeframe. While this advice is typically given for unexpected layoffs, or dealing with house or car emergencies (all of which are great reasons in their own right), it has the side benefit that you can start to loosen the hold that your job has over your life - you can start to push back on the work-life balance, because the consequences of losing your job are so much less important.

And/or: Have separate work and personal devices and never cross the streams. When I'm done working on Friday, I put my work laptop and work phone in a soundproof drawer and don't open the drawer until Monday morning.

At the very least don't install work Slack on your personal phone!!

Previously, when you show to a tribunal or whatever institution that they fired you for not working out of hours despite insisting it was some vague "job performance" reason, the tribunal says well, that's technically legal anyway, it's just rude, so too bad.

Now, it's illegal. So "some other reason" has to be watertight. If in the process of concocting a "some other reason" you trip another law, you don't get a Do Over because you were trying to break a different law, instead you have more trouble.

Why would you go this length and do this witch hunting? Do you have some issue in reading other people's views? I have commented this same view twice in different context and you consider that a "mission"? This is a behaviour I have seen so widespread here that it seems like a trend. In fact it's a thing! Go asking on r/india and see how that is. Now that would also be a very small set for you, isn't it? Well, that is definitely orders of magnitude higher than hn when it comes to this particular country. So get a feel there maybe?

Well, what is your mission? Since I mentioned my country's name (which I guess could be yours as well but I am not sure) is this somehow become a "prestige" issue for you?

I don't know whether a tag works here, but @dang is this kind of witch-hunting or attack acceptable here? Or is it rather kosher?

if you make less than ~$60k. Above that amount and you're exempt from being entitled to overtime.

This is incorrect. Entitlement to overtime pay varies from state to state. In California, for example, there are complex rules but for most employees, the analysis ultimately boils down to whether you spend more than 50% of your working hours performing exempt duties. If you don’t meet this threshold — even if you are highly compensated and have an executive title — you are not exempt and you must be paid overtime. It also does not matter if the company is paying you on a salary or hourly basis.