Australia enacts right to disconnect; why implementing it in India may be challenging

There are considerations that warrant limiting an employee’s working hours to something like the eight hours a day stipulated.

Australians have obtained the right to disconnect from work after their stipulated workday. Since August 26, workers cannot be punished for refusing to take calls or answer messages and email from their employers outside their workday. If that sounds a bit like something out of Disneyland, let us get some more details that fly closer to the ground.

One, the right applies only to workers below a certain paygrade, those whose employment terms do not anticipate being available even when they are out of office. Two, around 20 countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America, have similar rules, according to BBC. Ireland had instituted such a right in 2021, as a Code of Practice for employers and employees. France and Belgium also have similar rules.

What is the relevance of such a right in India? We might as well give every worker the right to live happily ever after – that is likely the initial reaction of most people. After all, our doyens of industry demand that young people work at least 70 hours a week, rant against western concepts like work-life balance, and celebrate the start-up culture of redefining an employee’s personal life goals as the goal of the company, and proceeding to cease not till the goal is reached.

The reality is that a lot of business these days is global, and a lot of work in India is part of, supports or caters to work taking place in one or more time zones other than India’s. This does not, of course, automatically mean that employees have to work outside their stipulated work hours – after all, work hours can be tailored to attend to the demands of work in other time zones, and enough resources can be deployed, so that no one has to spend more hours at work than regular eight hours a day for any kind of work, wherever that eight-hour window falls in the day-night cycle.

In some sectors of work, related to news, the worker concerned might feel it part of the work requirement to respond whenever something happens that amounts a news break, and that it is to her advantage to be on top of the event, whatever the time of day or night it might occur.

Even in the absence of such a special condition, in practice, companies are loath to spend on hiring and training the requisite number of people to ensure that work does not spill outside the stipulated workday for any of its employees. If an employee is disinclined to spend an arbitrary number of hours at work, there would be someone else lining up to take up that job.

Government economists might require reports of high levels of educated unemployment to be filed away under the classification fiction, sub-categorised as fantasy, but the reality of stagnant fresher salaries, even for engineers, tell a story of supply outstripping demand, giving employers the upper hand.

However, there are considerations that warrant limiting an employee’s working hours to something like the eight hours a day stipulated by International Labour Organisation. IlO norms also restrict overtime work to 50% of regular hours per day, provision of four days of holidays a month and breaks of at least 30 minutes in a workday of at least six hours.

One is reputation. After several suicides and other deaths attributable to overwork at Goldman Sachs, the bank issued guidelines to limit the number of hours employees can be asked to work, and made it compulsory for employees to take Saturdays off. Clearly, the fear of not being able to attract the best talent, rather than concerns for employee welfare, brought in these norms. All companies need to worry about how their work practices resonate with potential recruits and clients.

Another consideration is employee productivity. Pilots and air traffic controllers are not allowed to work beyond the point when their concentration would begin to flag. Every other kind of work might not mark the difference between life and death, in case of any employee slip-up. But shoddy work could mean poor quality, dissatisfied customers, and reputational damage. Depending on the employers’ level of ambition in their business, they have to ensure their workers remain active and engaged, rather than tired and surly.

Related to this is the cost of training and retaining useful employees. If extra-long work hours lead to high levels of attrition, the employer would have to make additional outlays on hiring and training, just to deploy the requisite number of proficient workers. And they would move on, if work conditions leave them exhausted.

A final consideration is enlightened self-interest of employers as a class. In the modern economy, a variety of business activities hinge on people having enough leisure to consume their offering. Such leisure-dependent activities range from movies and television, sports and gaming, tours and fun, and vacations and hospitality, to fiction and literature.

One company’s employees are customers for the rest of the economy. If the customer lacks money or time, not much business would transact. It is in the collective interest of all employers to think like Henry Ford, and pay their employees enough to purchase cars, and celebrate road trips.

Self-interested, our employers readily are; but can they be enlightened, at the same time? If they can be, Indians, too, could get the right to disconnect, and live happily, if not quite ever after.