The 9 to 5 is back! Time to put the phone on silent

If you’ve ever flicked off an email before bed, texted your boss out of hours, or received an “urgent” work call after clocking off, you’ll be glad to hear some respite is now at hand.

A new right to disconnect from work, for employees in businesses with 15 or more staff, is now in effect. This is a welcome response to the growing problem of “availability creep”, where work demands spill over into workers’ leisure time.

Artwork: Marija ErcegovacCredit:

The new right means most employees can now refuse to monitor and respond to unreasonable contact from their employers about work matters outside paid work hours.

Many of us are now online and digitally connected to our workplaces 24/7. This constant connectedness can make it hard to escape work calls, texts, and emails when not actually at work.
As we are now so easily contacted anywhere and anytime, our leisure and family time has become very susceptible to interruptions from work, leading to unpaid overtime, an inability to “switch off”, and blurred boundaries between work and non-work time. Gone are the days of 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours play.

The consequences are stark. Research has shown these work practices lead to increased stress, health problems and a poor work-life balance. The right to disconnect from work is one solution to the problems of availability creep and unpaid overtime.

The Senate Select Committee on Work and Care proposed this reform to Australia’s workplace laws in early 2023 and the initiative was included in the government’s Closing Loopholes package of workplace reforms passed by the federal parliament later that year. A similar right is in place in a number of other countries including France, Canada and the Philippines.

Australia’s new right to disconnect does not mean there is a blanket ban on contacting employees outside their scheduled work hours. Rather, it means that an employee cannot be penalised for refusing unreasonable contact.

There are many circumstances in which a manager’s attempts to contact an employee out of their work hours might be reasonable. For example, this could be where an employee is on-call and receiving an on-call allowance.

Some jobs regularly require a certain amount of out of hours contact and employees’ remuneration may reflect this. However, for many workers, contact out of working hours arises from pressures that lead to overwork and unpaid overtime. And unpaid overtime is a significant problem in Australia.

In 2023, employees responding to a Centre for Future Work survey reported working an average of 5.4 hours of unpaid overtime a week, with full-time employees reporting working an average of 6.2 hours a week of unpaid overtime. A conservative back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that’s an extra seven weeks’ work every year.

Workers should not have to monitor or respond to emails, text messages and phone calls after hours about concerns that could be raised and dealt with in their scheduled work time.

Poor organisation, understaffing and reliance on overwork are not good reasons for requiring employees to be available out of hours. It is these practices that the right to disconnect is intended to challenge.

Fears that workplace flexibility will be undermined as workers exercise their rights to disconnect are largely misplaced. In organisations where flexibility is based on employees’ constant availability there may be some disruption, but these are precisely the practices that the right to disconnect should disrupt.

Flexibility can exist alongside respect for employees’ rights to switch off from work. Good flexible work practices and arrangements are those that benefit both employers and employees, and are designed through negotiation and consultation. The dissolution of boundaries between work and leisure time is not the answer.

Will individual employees be lining up to ask the Fair Work Commission to order their employers to stop contacting them? Probably not. The real potential in the right to disconnect is its ability to catalyse an evolution in workplace expectations that shifts norms away from a reliance on overwork and constant availability.

Time to put that phone on silent.

Dr Fiona Macdonald is policy director, industrial and social with the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute.