From today, new laws give millions of people the "right to disconnect" from work. Employees will now be legally able to ignore calls, texts, and emails from their bosses and clients outside of working hours unless doing so is 'unreasonable'. The new legislation will apply to companies with 15 or more staff members. However, the changes won't stop employers from contacting workers outside of business hours unless the fair work commission says so.
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00:00A lot of these workplace changes, not much will change from today, Monday, to tomorrow,
00:06Tuesday.
00:07But over time, we're going to see this as an important point where we essentially had
00:10a bit of an inflection from the COVID level of availability, where people were essentially
00:16always on, to trimming it in as it has occurred in almost 25 countries around the world.
00:21So this right to disconnect gives employees, at most Australian businesses, the right to
00:26reasonably refuse contact from their employer or from a third party after hours.
00:32Now this is calls or texts or a desire to monitor email, things like that.
00:37If they can reasonably refuse to do so, they'll be able to, they'll be protected in doing
00:41that.
00:42Now employers and employees of smaller businesses, they will get the same right in exactly one
00:48year from today.
00:49Now this is a really big change.
00:52It means a lot, but there's still a lot to be worked out.
00:55I spoke to the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU, Sally
00:59McManus, about her impressions of what this will mean for Australian workers.
01:05Employers will still be able to contact people after hours.
01:07You will have a right to not have to constantly monitor your phone and to do so.
01:12If you've been paid to do so, well obviously you'll need to.
01:16If you're a high paid worker, you still will need to.
01:20If you get paid things like overtime, you'll still need to.
01:24You can't be expected to work for free and actually that's just a very basic concept.
01:29It's not a new concept.
01:30This is just reinforcing that right for workers.
01:34So what can employees do if their employers don't abide by these rules, Dan?
01:40Well that's where there's a lot to go.
01:41This legislation is very thin and the first line of it is essentially if there are disputes,
01:45they're to be worked out at a workplace level first before they go to the Fair Work Commission,
01:49which is a kind of tribunal for employment.
01:52Interestingly, I covered this about three or four years ago when the Victoria Police won this right.
01:56They described it as being like the 90s again.
02:00Essentially they would clock off and outside of emergencies or a welfare check from their boss,
02:05they essentially, their time was their own.
02:07What we've seen is the flexibility of laptops, email, mobile phones has gone both ways.
02:12It's been great for employees but it's probably been even greater for employers
02:17who have, through behaviours and through ways that works are set up,
02:21really expanded the hours of their employees without paying for them.
02:25So this doesn't mean that your boss cannot call you
02:28but what it does build is starts to create those guardrails around what are the new norms for contact,
02:34allowing people to have time off so that they can be more refreshed and, for companies, better workers.