Friday, 8 PM. You've come home, the weekend stretches ahead, and just when you're supposed to slip into “rest mode”, a work email lands in your inbox. Necessity, fear of losing your job, and many other reasons push you to reply, but that doesn't change the fact that it's unpaid time—and, at the same time, a form of abuse by the employer. In France, they've decided to put a stop to this practice, and yesterday the new Digital Disconnection Law went into effect. In short: no more work calls, emails, or messages outside their proper hours.
Technology has brought us many solutions, but it would be a serious act of ignorance not to recognize its problems. One of them is hyperconnectivity. Our digital lives are important, yet they are not our only lives. There comes a time when everyone wants to step away from screens, or alternatively, stay close to them thinking about leisure, not work. Even so, there are employers who don't seem to recognize the difference... or they do, and prefer to cross the line anyway. Have you received an email or message from work outside business hours? If your answer is yes, then you understand the problem. For a long time, this inability to disconnect has been evaluated, and its consequences strike on several levels: stress, depression, burnout syndrome, family problems, and of course, loss of productivity.
The El Khomri Law
Some countries are already working to change this, and France is among the first. Law 2016-1088, also known as the El Khomri Law (after Myriam El Khomri, France's current labor minister) or the Digital Disconnection Law, went into effect last Sunday, after being adopted on August 8, 2016. The text states that companies with 50 or more employees must begin negotiations (between both parties) to develop a structure that guarantees employees the right to ignore any work message or email received outside their working hours. If no agreement is reached, companies must create a “charter” detailing the new limits. This adds to the 35-hour workweek that already exists on French soil, but several media outlets note that the new law does not contemplate sanctions for those companies that fail to reach a definition.
Corporations Lead the Way
Certain very high-profile names have anticipated this trend, including Volkswagen (which has been turning off its servers since December 2011, from 6:15 PM to 7 AM), Michelin, and Orange. There are also other mechanisms, such as Daimler's auto-deletion of emails for employees on vacation. But France has taken the lead by turning the right to digital disconnection into law. The possibility that companies might use this to filter out “disloyal” employees exists, though it would surely lead to greater consequences.
