Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From today’s The Guardian:

Employers in Portugal will now face fines if they attempt to contact remote workers after hours, thanks to a new law.

The legislation was conceived by Portugal’s ruling Socialist party to improve work-life balance for the country’s remote workforce, which expanded due to Covid-19, and to make Portugal a more attractive base for international “digital nomads” – people who travel while telecommuting.

Portugal isn’t the only country modernizing its labor laws; citizens of France, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, India and more, all currently enjoy “the right to disconnect” – or abstain without punishment from working and communicating with their employers during designated rest periods.

In 2013, Germany’s employment ministry implemented a ban on employers contacting workers outside of contracted hours, and several of the country’s large employers, including Volkswagen and Daimler, have instituted policies intended to limit the number of emails employees receive outside of work hours, too.

The provincial government of Ontario is also introducing legislation that would require employers to establish a written policy setting generous “expectations about response time for emails and encouraging employees to turn on out-of-office notifications when they aren’t working”, according to a government release.

Could this ever happen in the United States?

“I don’t think that we’ll see a firm requirement of employers to not at all contact employees during non-work hours,” says Orly Lobel, professor of law at the University of San Diego.

While California does have laws against employers forcing employees to work overtime, and mandates that all overtime be paid, Lobel thinks that adopting and enforcing rules about work hours on a federal level would be overly complex and contradictory to the nature of globalized professional work, in which urgent tasks inevitably crop up and must be dealt with by someone.

Read the complete story here.

By Editor