Right to disconnect the new frontier at work in 2024

This holiday season, how often will you check your text messages and work emails? Is it time to disconnect?

Back to nine-to-five?

Almost 40 years ago when Pope John Paul II visited a Transfield plant in outer Sydney he had some inspiring words on hard yakka.

“It must be said over and over again that work is for man, not man for work,” he told those gathered there that day.

It was 1986, years before the internet and email and laptops and smartphones, before the true intensification of work powered by technology, a time when a pope could say something like that and sound as if he were not living in la-la land.

Today those words, which are in the Catholic catechism, can sound hollow to employees increasingly at the beck and call of their email and text messages.

This Christmas, it’s almost certain millions of off-duty workers will check their phones for work-related messages – even the Kimberley cattle grower, or the guy who installs backyard pools in Adelaide, or the hospital shiftworker in Melbourne or the bus driver in western Sydney is likely to receive emails and texts related to their jobs. The professionals and tech-based employees who have a few days off from their working-from-home equipment in the living room will not only check in but will likely do a spot of work on their small screens, keeping things ticking along until the festivities are over.

This blurring of work and non-work is now a given, even as Australia prepares to debate whether to legislate a clear line between the two domains.

The right to disconnect movement is gathering pace and an idea that once sounded too precious, too French to be adopted here has a good chance of being codified next year. It would allow workers, in effect, to say no to the boss if he or she makes an unreasonable request to engage after knock-off. No need to pick up the call or respond to the email in the evening or at the weekend.

The idea we could revert to the nine-to-five culture of pre-tech times has alarmed many employers, who argue a right to disconnect is out of synch with the way we now operate.

The buzz word is flexibility and some employers argue it’s a two-sided coin: you can work from home but you should be available. The irony is the bid to separate work and non-work comes as workers enjoy unprecedented physical freedom; thanks to Covid, many are already disconnected from their workplaces.

It has been a revolution four years in the making and while there were times when workers looked to be losing ground to the bosses, hybrid is here to stay.

This week, The Australian published the views of the country’s top chief executives on working from home. They’re not necessarily happy but they’re not talking about five days in the workplace. Instead, chief executives, worried about productivity, figure they’re winning if workers show up a couple of days a week. This remarkable change in the nation’s working arrangements has been somewhat unacknowledged, in part because it was employer-led rather than driven by an industrial battle or worker demands, and because it happened overnight in the first Covid wave in 2020.

In those early months, chief executives focused on keeping workers away from the office, on redesigning systems and delivering technology to maintain profits.

HR departments flipped from restricting to enabling remote work. Bosses discovered the joy of not going into the office. Managers, those who never believed people would work when out of sight, saw many tasks done better at home. Later, health and safety issues, vaccination rights and the exhaustion of managing during a pandemic meant it took time for companies to start seriously calling workers back as Covid abated.

There were other factors: in a tight labour market managers knew too much pressure on staff to return would see them decamp. Legally, companies could generally stipulate a return, but fear of the “Great Resignation” hobbled many. It was only in early 2023 that many companies announced clear policies on days in and out of the office, although many are still encouraging rather than enforcing. That’s not only because they fear losing staff but because flexibility is now seen as a right; companies calculate many workers will be unhappy and unproductive if they don’t get to choose their working arrangements. Two days a week away from the office now appears the baseline.

(There are sectors where WFH is impossible and they may face even more pressure over time. A teacher tells me, for example, that colleagues exit not because of unruly kids or poor pay but because “you have to be there, in front of the class, at very specific times and there is absolutely no flexibility”.)

The downside for unprecedented flexibility is the “availability creep” born of technology. We have few compunctions about contacting a direct report or a colleague at any time, because we can, right? The price of freedom is to have your device switched on always, right?

But just how should society manage the “work is for man, man is not for work” concept? What’s a reasonable balance between national productivity and personal health and happiness? If we can achieve the same profits but lighten the load, should we not? And what is reasonable in today’s world?

Last year, a Senate select committee argued that technology put too much pressure on workers and this year, as the federal government battled to pass its workplace laws, the Greens identified the right to disconnect as a potential negotiating tool.

The government finally passed some changes but must go back to the crossbenchers if it wants to pass new casual employment provisions and minimum standards for gig workers. That’s when the right to disconnect, already accepted in a stack of European countries, will become a bargaining chip for crossbench support.

Greens employment spokeswoman Barbara Pocock is leading the charge. The South Australian senator had had decades of experience in workplace analysis when she was elected last year. The 68-year-old economist has published extensively on work, including the impact of long hours on Australian families.

Pocock told workplace editor Ewin Hannan recently that some workers felt they faced a “runaway epidemic of expectation that the technology makes you available”.

She says “unreasonable contact” is when a nurse is off-duty but is “contacted eight times on a Sunday about what’s going on, on the ward”. It’s also about “people who are expected to turn up 15 minutes before their minimum wage shift in a retail operation to set it up and at the end of the day close it down for 15 minutes without any payment in that period”.

Outlawing such practices would likely gain public support and be relatively easy to stamp out. But for the hybrid crew, operating in the blurred zone of work and non-work, saying no to the boss may be more complicated. Pocock, for example, cites as a no-no the expectation public servants check email over the weekend so they are up to date on Monday. That practice is common in the private sector and many workers prefer to clear a backlog of messages before the workday begins.

It’s when that becomes an expectation rather than a choice that employees jack up. A right to disconnect would give them recourse they now lack, but it will be the response of individual employers that will determine how often parties end up in front of the Fair Work Commission.