Australian workers will now have the legal “right to disconnect” from work, as per a rule which came into effect on Monday. This means they can now ignore their bosses’ emails, phone calls, and texts outside of work hours.
It entitles employees to ignore out-of-hours attempts by employers to contact them unless this refusal is deemed to become “unreasonable.”
“We want to make sure that just as people don’t get paid 24 hours a day, they don’t have to work for 24 hours a day. It’s a mental health issue, frankly, as well, for people to be able to disconnect from their work and connect with their family and their life,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in an interview with national broadcaster ABC.
Usually these laws have somewhat neutered benefits though. Even though employees may have a right to ignore calls/texts/etc, the company can still decide to let you go (for “unrelated reasons”) or promote other people instead. If they don’t explicitly say they’re doing it as retaliation for refusing to communicate after hours, you can’t really hold them accountable.