OPINION: Can’t stay away from work in digital age

CHECKING emails and texts at night or on the weekend has become all too common for workers

DOES working in the digital age mean you are on call 24 hours a day seven days a week?

Sometimes it feels like that.

Should there be legislation to say you can't check your emails or texts after 6pm or on weekends?

That would never work.

And yet here we are in the digital age most of us still pretending we are working a standard 38-hour week with all the meal breaks and overtime provisions included.

Modern workplace rules and regulations simply haven't caught up to this digital drift.

There have been loads of surveys which suggest about a third of full-time employees in Australia work 48 hours or more.

The only jobs I ever got out on time was working for the Commonwealth Bank and in a grog shop.

But no employer has ever been standing over my shoulder telling me to work all those extra hours, or to respond to that email on the weekend, or take the phone call late at night, I just do it for the most part because I like my job and take a fair degree of pride in it.

This has all cropped up because a group of 34 academics calling themselves the Work + Family Policy Roundtable suggested working hours should be capped at 38 hours a week so men were more able to share the load in the home and increase the chances of women participating in work.

Other conditions they suggested included: paid palliative care leave, domestic violence leave and paid annual leave on a pro-rata basis for casuals.

We need a new dialogue about what the 'typical' week looks like.