Millions of workers are ‘never quite switching off’ and are answering emails out of hours, warns Autonomy, a think tank. It suggests that the 1996 Employment Rights Act should be amended to give employees a legal ‘right to disconnect’.
Unfortunately for Autonomy, Labour’s new deal for workers, outlined last month, somewhat stole its thunder. Spearheaded by deputy leader Angela Rayner, the party’s radical package of labour market reforms includes a default right to flexible working, new worker status for those in the gig economy and, of course, a French-style law barring employers from contacting workers outside strictly regulated hours.
Nonetheless, Autonomy’s suggestion has received fawning coverage. The Guardian headline referring to the piece suggested that Covid has ushered in an overtime ‘epidemic’ – a word deployed so exhaustively in this crisis that it’s virtually devoid of meaning. The word actually means ‘a sudden outbreak of infectious disease that spreads rapidly through the population, affecting a large proportion of people’. Your boss contacting you at 5.01pm hardly fits that description.
Unlike countries such as France, however, the UK has a flexible labour market with a marvellously wide range of types of employment
The Daily Mail, meanwhile, led with the claim that women have been ‘working harder than men’. Studies have shown they’ve taken on the bulk of home-schooling and housework over the past 18 months, but we should be wary of suggesting that women have had a tougher time of Covid-19. The normalisation of home working will offset rather than compound many of the negative effects of the pandemic on women. And data from the Office for National Statistics has found men increased their childcare responsibilities during lockdown.
Across the globe, countries have been attempting to identify and enact effective right to disconnect laws for years. France, Italy and Spain now have legislation, and Ireland has recently introduced a ‘Code of Practice’ giving employees the right to switch off from work outside of normal working hours.
Unlike countries such as France, however, the UK has a flexible labour market with a marvellously wide range of types of employment. Before coronavirus hit, four million employees worked ‘flexi-time’ and two million had annualised hours contracts. Nearly 1.5 million had term-time only jobs. Over 100,000 had job shares. A right to log off might suit some jobs, but creating legislation that could cover all these possibilities – not to mention the countless exemptions (emergency workers, firms operating across time zones) – would be near-impossible.
What’s more, we shouldn’t forget that Britain’s hugely diverse labour market facilitates a wide range of lifestyles. While there are plenty of 9-5 jobs which would allow for a right to step back, many people don’t want to work this way. For some – lawyers on the cusp of closing a deal, advertising executives whose creative juices are mid-flow – the stress of being forced to clock off could exceed that of burning the midnight oil.
To be fair to Autonomy, some workers will indeed be ‘burnt out’. There can be little doubt that remote working has blurred the lines between office and home. One pre-coronavirus WFH experiment at CTrip, a NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency, found that home working led to a 13 per cent performance increase, but mainly because employees were working more minutes per shift due to fewer breaks and sick-days. (Over half of these workers later opted to WFH permanently.)
It’s hard to discern what the end game is here, but there’s a distinct whiff of cakeism. Rayner wants workers to be given hours which allow children to be taken to and collected from school. Fine, but how is this compatible with the ‘healthy boundaries’ she insists we set – and who is setting them anyway? And how autonomous will workers really feel if restrictions are placed on out-of-hours contact?
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this isn’t really about an individual’s control over the structure of their day, but rather grasping for new sticks with which to beat businesses.
In exchange for a right to disconnect, firms may expect that employees work nose to the grindstone during their contracted hours. No popping to the bank mid-morning, no surfing the web. Many bosses will accommodate employee needs – but some may just contract more work out to mitigate the risk of being dragged before an employment tribunal. Is this really benefitting employees?
Contrary to the anti-capitalist zeitgeist, all workers are not exploited nor all employers unscrupulous. They are able to come to an arrangement that suits their needs without the need for state interference. We should let them.
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