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Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

cebert

Comments (147)

  • roughly
    There's a weird incuriosity in the responses here for a place that calls itself Hacker News. "This doesn't happen to me" is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them. Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. Every good hack comes from understanding the world well enough to see the hack in the first place - someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift.
  • quadrifoliate
    Lots of privilege in this thread showing. This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today". Please remember that just because you aren't expected to have consistent unpaid after-hours comms doesn't mean that others don't.Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
  • al_borland
    Where I work, in Michigan, people used to be compensated if they were called for on-call work. Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing.I used to get called a lot, when my boss also ran the critical incident team. These days, I don’t get called much, the there is always a looming threat. I miss the days when being done with work meant that I was actually done with work.
  • edent
    Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times.I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
  • lpolovets
    I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. For example when I was an engineer 15-20 years ago, my friends would deprioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses:- handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result.- scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future.- if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
  • theptip
    This seems mostly good for restaurants, some concerns I had from the title seem to be handled reasonably.It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?
  • nickjj
    I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
  • Havoc
    Maybe I just have abnormal leverage but I've never had after hours coms be an issue.I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
  • oatmeal1
    > But in general, should this bill become law in Michigan, an employer could not require an employee to access or respond to work-related matters outside of their assigned hours... Violations could be reported to the state's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with fines to the company and/or overtime pay to the employee among the possible results.It will be too easy for employers to say to the DOL the employee was not actually required to respond to the work-related matter when they told the employee they are expected to. Laws like these don't solve problems (bargaining power disparity caused by a variety of factors), they solve symptoms. It may not have a significant effect.
  • cebert
  • hintymad
    That means tech companies won't hire engineers in Michigan if they are required to be oncall, as many such engineers rotate their oncall schedules?
  • tbrownaw
    How would this interact with existing rules around exempt / non-exempt (roughly, salaried vs hourly) employees?I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
  • throwaway85825
    Companies that desire on call need to be willing to pay an hourly rate for 24 hours of possible labor.
  • yamillove
    One thing I wonder is how will this politician work an after hours meeting with the citizens.Will she not show up or will she tell her constituents that THEY need to do the meeting at HER working hours?
  • ElProlactin
    While I don't disagree with the intent, the reality is that workers are already at a significant disadvantage and many don't feel they have the leverage to be more firm about boundaries (with most of them feeling this way being correct about their lack of leverage).Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
  • gblargg
    I'm fine if they want to give me extra work when I'm not on the job. I round up to the hour, so choose your after-hours emails wisely.
  • giancarlostoro
    How do bills like these work for jobs where you are literally on call for outages?
  • headz
    It kind of baffles me that this needs to be a bill. I guess I'm lucky that I've never worked for a company that required me to be constantly online. (I work remotely for a US company, work European working hours, and nobody requires me to be online outside of them.)
  • geor9e
    it's spelled "comms" although that is still jargon and the actual headline is "contact"
  • cactusplant7374
    Michigan is becoming poorer relative to its neighboring states. Maybe not the right time for this?
  • marsninja
    Hot take: The reality is unless this becomes a ban on after hours coms (which likely isn't feasible), economic incentives will prevail. Folks that are less available, less engaged, and in less communication will be darwin'd out.Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
  • yamillove
    [flagged]
  • tlogan
    [flagged]
  • roenxi
    Regardless of whether people agree with the concept or not, this seems like excessive bureaucracy. This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract and it seems like just paperwork to have more laws saying that someone's reasonable working hours are indeed their agreed reasonable working hours. It shouldn't and probably doesn't need an act to metaphorically underline a short phrase in a contract. It is just creating drag on small businesses and that sort of thing costs money. I suppose this is an opportunity to link my favourite article reminding everyone that petty business regulation pretty much just makes countries poorer [0].It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation