There's a weird incuriosity in the responses here for a place that calls itself Hacker News. "This doesn't happen to me" is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them. Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. Every good hack comes from understanding the world well enough to see the hack in the first place - someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift.
DUduxup1 天前
I think "this doesn't happen to me" is a valid response. We're all here sharing.
I find the internet full of panic and fear and negativity these days and it overstates how pervasive a thing is.
Example: I travel to Disney World sometimes. There's a recent hubub about transportation and the blame is all on "OMG THE INFLUENCERS ARE EVERYWHERE".
In those situations it's interesting how many people will spread those stories about influencers saturating the park / causing problems and yet ... most every user who replies "I've never seen one at the park".
Everyone's experience is valid IMO. Everyone gets to express their lived experience.
There used to be a lot of "abusive start up demands massive hours" talk on HN. I actually think people expressing how it isn't that way everywhere / doesn't have to be that way is VERY helpful. Folks in those situations now know that maybe they have options.
FOfossilwater1 天前
While abusive work environments may not be the norm for the majority of people, this being a law will benefit everyone.
Saying this doesn't happen to you in threads like this just signifies that you don't care, you basically downplay other people's bad experiences because well, it doesn't concern you.
You may not be affected now but you never know when it will happen to you or to someone close to you, and you would be glad that such law exists protecting you.
LAlaughing_man20 小时前
> ... this being a law will benefit everyone.
If it were national, sure. As is, companies will see Michigan as a bad place to hire people, which was probably not the goal.
GOgofreddygo1 天前
Its valid but useless.
Think someone says i'm thirsty all the time because there's little clean water available, what's available is expensive but it could be better if we did so-and-so.
and someone replies I'm not thirsty.
ROroughly1 天前
It’s impossible for a lizard to convince a sheepdog to turn up the thermostat. It’s impossible for a sheepdog to convince a lizard to turn down the thermostat.
Which one is right?
ATatoav1 天前
The two things you have commented on are not equivalent.
One person offers insight and the other reacts. Such a reaction is inherently on a different plane than a original statement, because you chose to make it about yourself, in the presence of another persons slice of their reality.
To give a crass example:
A: I had a shitty day, they took my dog and killed it
B: Well, *my* dog is still alive
To which I would say: Congrats on telegraphing to the world you are a self-centered asshole that wouldn't recognize the concept of empathy if it jumped into their face.
ATatoav1 天前
Counterpoint: anecdotal evidence is sometimes actively harmful and you should consider not sharing it in certain situations.
I know, some people have the reflexive urge to make every situation about themselves, but I think you should instead be aware that (1) your own experience is not necessarily representative of the broader reality and (2) even if it is may distract from the topic being discussed.
Don't get me wrong, everybodies lived experience is in fact valid. And yet that doesn't mean it is appropriate to share it at all times. If your friend tells you their newborn died during childbirth telling them: "Well mine didn't" would be actively abusive behavior. If someone tells you an intimate story about how being poor affected them as a child, there are certain ways to share your experience of how your parents always bought you everything you wanted that productively add to the topic and others that distract from it.
Always remember that everybody just sharing their experience is a different thing from you reacting on some others experience. What may be a fun anecdote for you, may be a life-defining experience for others.
Aside from these examples anecdotal evidence can be destructive if it ignores that the plural of anecdotes is not data.
BLbluealienpie1 天前
This is the media equivalent of showing a family swimming on the lake when discussing heatwave death. You have valid life experience but it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.
DUduxup1 天前
It's relevant. We're people sharing and discussing, not a TV show.
The idea that if we're discussing a problem that only people with that problem may share their experience is absurd at face value.
DEDetroitThrow1 天前
"10% of Americans are uninsured. A US state is pushing to insure all of their residents."
"I'm insured!"
"Open-source software projects are being spammed with LLM generated PRs. Contributions are becoming more restricted".
"I have a repo that isn't being spammed!"
Sometimes sharing a somewhat related experience is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and also completely uninteresting. It does not matter that somehow their "experience is valid".
_D_DeadFred_1 天前
[deleted]
JGJgrubb1 天前
"Privilege is thinking that something isn't a problem because it doesn't affect you personally." is a sticker I bought once.
TEtengbretson1 天前
I've never bought a sticker like that.
ROroughly1 天前
I haven't either. I'm honestly questioning how many resources are being wasting on bumper stickers we don't buy. Is this why I couldn't find the sticker I wanted last week?
ATatoav1 天前
Well, I have many stickers I like.
ECecon22 小时前
What if you did?
ARarchagon1 天前
Thanks for the laugh.
NUnunez1 天前
Teachers have it the worst. For many of them, there is no way to do the job right without bringing work home and being available after hours.
Tech sales can be just as bad. This is more understandable, but if customers didn't work outside of work hours, sales folks wouldn't need to either (since speed outside of work would no longer be an advantage).
TOToValueFunfetti1 天前
Are there particular responses you have in mind? I can find two comments making this point, one which opens with
>Maybe I just have abnormal leverage
while the other opens with
>I'm curious
The top two top-level comments are responding to this trend, so I assume it is or was present, but I'm not seeing it. I do wish people would reply to the comments they find objectionable instead of doing these meta comments subtweeting them because I find I run into this issue often lately here (pot-kettle objection noted and accurate).
DUduxup1 天前
Long ago I once participated on a forum where meta conversation about the conversation was not allowed. It really did a nice job to avoid the kind of (often way off) meta comments about other comments that come up like this.
It's telling if someone can't actually find a comment to reply to in order to address whatever meta issue they're concerned about.
ROroughly1 天前
I think there's two things I'd point to here -
The first is that, by the standards of the world at large, this is a relatively homogeneous community. It is still a wildly diverse community, that's one of the things that makes it valuable, but in the same way that psychology has a WEIRD[1] problem, Hacker News is homogeneous - we're more likely, as a community, to not include a viewpoint sampled at random from humanity than to include it.
That points towards the second, which is that there's a tendency within this group where, when a news article comes up or a law is proposed or an academic study is posted in which some factor of human life is discussed ("X% of people experience food scarcity", "Y state bill would bar employers from Z", "B in C people are genetic carriers for Q"), to discuss it from our own viewpoint - "My cousin who experienced food scarcity was a klepto," "my employer tried to call me off hours and I didn't answer," "my cousin died from Q." This is both intensely human and often fairly useless here, because of point one above. I am a straight white male who grew up in a house whose affluence varied but never dropped below sustenance who's worked in tech my entire life. I have parts of myself that are genuinely different, where I feel I can genuinely provide new information to the group (I've had heart surgery, for instance), but by and large, if I share my experience with this group, it's to commiserate with colleagues. I am part of this community; things which seem strange to me are more likely than not to be outside this broader community's lived experiences as well.
So my critique here, broadly, is that we as a professed group of hackers - as a group of people who've self-labeled as curious - have a bad tendency to read things that indicate an experience of life that we haven't or don't have (in this case, that someone could be unable to deny their employer after-hours comms) and focus on our own experiences, rather than recognizing that we're being provided an opportunity to expand our understanding of the possible states of the world or the possibilities of being for people in this world.
It's understandable and deeply human that we would do so - we're social creatures, and community building is in part an act of expressing and validating commonality - but for a group whose self-identity is curiosity, to respond to evidence of someone else's lived experience by reiterating our own lived experience when that experience is likely to be within that of the broader group present is... well, it just takes up space.
(By the way, this is the point in the post where I'm going to nod towards my neurodivergent brethren: when I say below "we," if the point I'm making doesn't apply to you, understand that if you were in a room with you, me, and 10 wolves, and I said "there's too many wolves in this room," and you responded "well I'm not a wolf," I would agree with you and that wouldn't change my point.)
We are, broadly, a privileged group. Broadly, the people on this forum have remarkable market power. Broadly, the people on this forum are wealthy. Broadly, the people on this forum are educated. If, when you comment on a thread, you are expressing a part of your lived experience that broadly coincides with the lived experience of the median person on this forum, _you are not adding to the discussion._ You're not expanding the discussion. You're not helping people learn. You're not, yourself, learning. If you read something on this forum and think, "weird, that's not how I experience the world," think to yourself "Am I adding to this discussion by saying that?"
1. https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/spow8trw/release/1
ANanon3738391 天前
I think in many cases this has less to do with incuriosity and more to do with denial.
TBtbrownaw1 天前
> Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model.
...than it does for you, which means there's an opportunity for someone to expend resources verifying and characterizing the claimed difference.
DAdarth_avocado1 天前
It’s easy to dismiss something by saying “it’s not been my experience”. It would be a huge waste of time if every such claim requires expending resources verifying and characterizing the difference. There should be a higher bar for discourse on HN.
TBtbrownaw1 天前
The comment I was replying to appears to be a call for unquestioning belief. Which is the far extreme in the opposite direction.
GRgrayhatter1 天前
No, it doesn't, or at the very least, that wasn't my read and I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation. The comment starts with the topic, shock at the lack of curiosity from a group happy to comment in the theme of news interesting to hackers, and concludes with an argument that someone sharing their life/experience is something valuable.
IMO, the only reasonable argument one could take, is that roughly believes hackers should be curious, and that if you want to treat humans with the respect they deserve as individuals, you should default to trying to believe what they say, listening when they try to communicate, and avoid ignoring what they're trying to communicate just so you can interject something unrelated about yourself.
I not only agree, but I'm glad someone took a moment to encourage treating others with respect.
LOlokar1 天前
Assume good faith. Don’t cross examine.
MAmalcolmgreaves1 天前
Not at all.
BEbellowsgulch1 天前
Despite dang and others saying x or y about Hacker News and how such and such is a noob opinion—-the people themselves, the demographic, has changed and I’ve seen it over the years.
ECecon22 小时前
Have the thought leaders been replaced with confused people???
GRgrayhatter1 天前
> someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift.
I'm not sure about that, but to your higher point, HN hasn't taken pride in it's nominative determinism nature, nor does it appear to be a desired trait from the majority. But the continued enshittifcation aside, "it doesn't happen to me" is still a useful observation. That shouldn't be read as a refutation, because I already agree with your point. The intent of most of the comments your objecting to, likely does come from a narcissistic compulsion, to turn the topic to something about them.
But I could easily say "it doesn't happen to me" while (poorly) trying to convey a message of encouragement towards self-confidence, and self-worth. Rather, it doesn't happen to me, because I haven't been gaslit into the shared and common delusion that: if you get fired, it'll because of something you did, and not because your manager felt like it. "Employee didn't answer the call/message at 10pm" is the reason they'll invent to fire you after they've decided to fire you. It won't be the root cause. You can just turn your messages off, and nothing bad will happen because you didn't respond.
Are there dysfunctional companies where something like that will get you fired? Absolutely! I would have hoped that existing wrongful termination laws would have already prevented this kinda thing, (if they don't that's a much larger problem) but I have no objections to making this an explicit law to compel the behavior of the sub-human group that would rather mistreat their coworkers. But given that within places that behave like this, this law would only fix a small subset of the pervasive human rights abuses inflicted during non-working hours. I feel like something more expansive should be done to protect those people from clearly abusive behavior.
I still expect that the vast majority of the people that would benefit from this, could simply just turn their phone off, and no one would notice... because while it's a problem, that does happen to some people, one that needs to be fixed! It doesn't happen to me, and probably doesn't really happen to you (most people) either.
QUquadrifoliate1 天前
Lots of privilege in this thread showing. This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today". Please remember that just because you aren't expected to have consistent unpaid after-hours comms doesn't mean that others don't.
Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
NFnfw21 天前
Most of the roles I've had involved irregular and long hours. In most cases, I've been happy to take these roles.
The article isn't clear how exactly this is intended to work. I think no surprise hours that aren't recognized in the terms of employment makes sense. But also I think I should be able to agree to being available if I am willing to be. Remote Michigan tech workers already have enough trouble as tech companies insist on returning to office.
PRpreg_match1 天前
If long and irregular hours are expected, then those hours should be tracked and paid out at a rate. Companies absolutely abuse salary exemptions and it’s getting ridiculous.
If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly employee. Not a salary one. You might be called a salary employee. But no, you’re working as an hourly employee.
If companies expect you to be on call, that’s great. Pay an on call hourly rate. Problem solved. But you can’t just take a salary employee, treat them like they work at McDonald’s and then pay a base bi weekly salary. That’s not okay IMO.
NFnfw21 天前
If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. If that isn't amenable to you, don't agree to it. Why does this government need to butt in?
MAmalicka1 天前
Do remember that without the government, there very literally would be no forty-hour work week. Individuals don’t have the same bargaining power as employers, not by a long-shot.
PRpreg_match13 小时前
The government needs to butt in because this arrangement doesn’t benefit the employer. They would prefer you “clock in” while still receiving a salary exempt pay check.
So, why would they do something that works against them? Think about it. Do you go out of your way to advocate against yourself? No, right? So why would you expect them to do that? It’s just not a reasonable expectation.
Now, they might still do it anyway. Great, but you can’t expect that. So, we need to curb the incentives to get the desired behavior.
It’s just the dynamics of human behavior. Companies aren’t some magical beast - they, too, fact the push and pull of human behavior and incentives.
QUquadrifoliate1 天前
Again to my point, there is a lot of "I" in your comment. What this legislation means is that on aggregate, the politicians sponsoring are hearing from their constituents that they are being overworked via expectations of off-hours communication. This might not be the case with you.
> If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. Why does this government need to butt in?
This legislation...does not affect you then. All it's saying is that the employer cannot require you to respond to something on 9pm on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday unless you are paid for it. You are still free to do so, it's just that your employer can't fire you if you don't. This seems sort of reasonable to me.
NEnekusar1 天前
Oh I've known from back my food service days that "management" aka salary was a fucking scam.
It was ALWAYS a way to get massive unpaid overtime extracted upon threat of firing. And overtime for workers was inexcusable, no matter what. Got a rush? Too fucking bad, clock out.
These days professionally, I agreed to 40h/week. That's what they get. If there's a real outage or un-manufactured crisis, then I'll stick around. But its comp time for the week.
I don't work for free for capitalists. If they want more labor, they can pay for more.
MImicrogpt1 天前
> I don't work for free for capitalists.
What's your opinion on [cuck licensing](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708655)?
FUfuzzy_lumpkins1 天前
Same. For my role I need to be able to be on hands after 5 here and there, and I knew that going in and works great for me because of the level I’m at. But absolutely employees should have the full choice without coercion or fear of repercussions.
IDidiotsecant1 天前
This is simple. You're on call, you're paid to be on call. Anyone accepting anything different is encouraging this behaviour. Unionize and this goes away.
UNunknown1 天前
[deleted]
TBtbrownaw1 天前
> a lot of people who are victims of
Are there statistics somewhere about what percent of people in various roles get asked but know they're safe declining, or mistakenly think they can't decline, or correctly think they'd get in trouble for declining, or don't get asked but think they have to anyway?
CHChu4eeno1 天前
I can recommend the documentary Office Space, it goes into great detail about this.
GWgwbas1c1 天前
> It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
Laws like this often happen in the states first, if/when they catch on, it puts pressure on the federal government; often to avoid the confusion of 50 different variations on the law.
JAjackfischer1 天前
Why is this a government issue at all? It was unclear from the article why some contingent that doesn't like their relationship with their employer ought to be able to inflict their solution on everyone in Michigan via politics as the mechanism instead of the market
RArainsford1 天前
Government regulation around conditions of employment has a very long history, because "the market" has a long history of producing things like Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire when it's allowed to.
While in theory the market punishes bad employers by making people not want to work for them, the reality is that for all but the most in-demand individuals, the power asymmetry between an individual and their employer is such that some level of government regulation is probably needed to maintain reasonable working conditions. You could certainly argue whether regulating this particular thing is a good idea or not of course.
JAjackfischer22 小时前
Broadly agreed. But the triangle shirtwaist factory is about as far from "my boss calls me and it's stressful" as one can get! I'm disappointed that a some activists can inflict their preference for comfort on all of us.
QUquadrifoliate1 天前
> Why is this a government issue at all?
For the same reason anything is a government issue, i.e. that we regulate acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as a society, and periodically adjust what we find acceptable?
If your employer starts dumping large amounts of trash on your property tomorrow and says "oh that's just part of our relationship with you", I bet you'll want to get the government involved real quick because you never agreed to this.
JAjackfischer22 小时前
The line of what rises to the level of "solve it with force", eg solve it with legal intervention, is understandably blurry. But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so. This OTOH is a private aspect of the employee employer relationship and not exactly a human rights abuse like some of the pearl clutching comments here suggest
FWIW writing as someone who went through and goes through very intense on call and all hours availability and firefighting for weeks on end, something I chose voluntarily. I don't want anyone interfering with my ability to choose that and accomplish what we accomplished.
QUquadrifoliate13 小时前
If you signed a contract to do all-hours firefighting, this still doesn't affect that.
> But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so.
That's exactly what this legislation is doing. All it's saying is, if you want off-hours work, make it explicit rather than implicit. If you fire people by expecting firefighting when it's not specified in the contract, you will break the law.
YUyusefnapora16 小时前
The proposed bill would still allow you to choose to be on-call. Your boss just has to compensate you for your time explicitly when it falls outside of agreed hours, instead of getting an implicit claim to your entire life by virtue of your employment agreement.
HEHenchman211 天前
Government is meant, in part, to give some amount of power & push-back to the least among us. Representative government is the solution we arrived at after we decided it was kinda shitty to just kill each other.
Why are you trying to deny people the representation they deserve and prevent the government from doing something people might want? Seems like some ideologically-based bullshit to me.
JAjackfischer22 小时前
_Some_ people _might_ want - and a very privileged something at that! This is not west virginia coal wars. Why do a handful of ideologues get to insert themselves in the employee employer relationship for something so tame?
CAcalvinmorrison1 天前
one of the most common in lower paying jobs is just CONSTANT scheduling churn, group texts with the entire restaurant/bar you're supposed to on. Instead of having a normal schedule everything is ad hoc
GEgenewitch1 天前
i heard, long ago, there's a reason for that. it can't be the nonsense it looks like since so many established places use ad-hoc scheduling, it appears. I like the other kind of ad-hoc scheduling, which is i roll in when i get in, and take lunch when i get hungry, and leave when traffic has cleared up.
EXexpedition321 天前
Buddha was exceptional because he actually WANTED to know what was going on outside of his luxury palace.
Most people just want to pretend everything is fine. They sleep better at night.
SESE5pc3JhY2lzdA1 天前
This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today"
Conversely, I've seen the latest heat wave in France to try to justify global warming all over HN comments, when the reality is that this is temperature and not climate.
"Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other."
If someone that worked for me is unwilling to help out in these situations occasionally, I wouldn't make them do anything (and follow the law). I also wouldn't promote them.
Many higher level positions require a certain level of responsibility, and this would just show me that the person can't handle it.
I do agree though. If this law were in Michigan and I had a company here, any job that required after hours communication would be outsourced to another state or country.
CRcroon20 小时前
One instance of weather is not climate, but climate dictates variance in weather.
GEgenewitch1 天前
do you pay overtime for helping out?
EDedent1 天前
Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times.
I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.
I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.
Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
GUgumby2711 天前
Check out Buzzkill, its a great app for managing notification rules. You can set it to hide and batch up notifications during your off hours and show them later.
VLvlunkr1 天前
I use 2 different email apps for exactly this reason. I can check my work email if I need to, but I don’t want notifications.
QEQem1 天前
> Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal.
You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.
ROrobhlt1 天前
This is still a thing on Android if your work account is a Google account and uses the Work profile feature. You can pause all apps in the Work profile on a schedule (or on demand), so it includes any work apps you might have in addition to email.
THthroe9393i44i1 天前
Second phone?
PWpwg1 天前
Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.
SOSoftTalker1 天前
Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?
CHchildofhedgehog1 天前
My IT department and I fully support staff requesting YubiKeys, there’s no concept of being a “troublemaker” for having boundaries and respecting security requirements. I’d talk to your IT management if your company culture seems different, I bet the actual techs do not have an issue with this.
PWpwg1 天前
> Where do you draw the line?
If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device".
My private phone is not for their use, ever.
NOnosioptar1 天前
I'm happy to be the "troublemaker". In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
TAtassadarforaiur1 天前
One of the biggest banks in the US forces staff and contractors alike to install a proprietary 2fa app on their personal devices. if you can get a company phone, you can't finish activating the MDM, to install the company 2fa app, without first using that 2fa app on your personal device. Even a company yubikey can't be activated without the 2fa appp, which again, you can't get on a company device without first installing it on your personal device.
8N8note1 天前
if the company wants to identify me by my phone, they have to take control over the phone. eg. a rooted android can screw with their app
that means they need to provide it
IDidiotsecant1 天前
Yes. That is where you draw the line. Work use of your personal device. Why is this so hard to imagine? If you're working somewhere where not donating resources to your employer means you are a troublemaker, it's time to find new work.
BRbrendoelfrendo1 天前
They can buy a USB Fido token. I've had this argument with employers in the past; some states have laws that require the employer compensate employees for requiring the use of their personal mobile device, even for something as simple as MFA. There's no such thing as a free lunch: if you want to require an employee do something, you must be willing to pay for that capability. Ethically, I think all employers should be held to this standard. Legally, anyone who employs people in California, Montana, and I think Massachusetts must be aware of that standard.
TOtough1 天前
I would install the app on the shittiest iPhone backup i have (I must have like 10 iPhones by now, i dont sell old ones)
You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)
Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too
Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.
NEnekusar1 天前
If its a standards compliant TOTP 2fa, I don't have any issue in adding those to my app.
If its the terrible MS authenticator or DUO, then get me a device.
YFyfontana1 天前
Having to lug 2 phones around has always seemed like more trouble than it's worth to me. I also don't like having multiple devices to do stuff that a single one could do, for environmental reasons, but that's not a very wide-spread opinion.
So I do have work stuff on my personal phone, but with no notifications whatsoever. Only works because I'm in a position where it's acceptable to require all communications to go through emails or messaging apps though.
BLbluefirebrand1 天前
I'm not worried about notifications on my personal phone, I just don't want to install anything work related there. I don't want them to have even a tiny bit of chance of having access to my personal data, photos, browsing, anything
Im with GP, absolutely no work stuff on my personal phone
TBtbrownaw1 天前
> Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck
My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
LOlokar1 天前
I’m torn. I’d prefer the 2nd phone, but at some point it’s not worth arguing about. If they are paying enough I just mentally subtract the cost from my comp.
LOlostlogin1 天前
I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night.
KEKennyBlanken1 天前
If a device is owned by a corporate entity it becomes trivial for them to engage in wildly intrusive monitoring.
For example, if Apple can verify the device was purchased by a corporate entity and then enrolled in an mobile device management system, it will allow a lot of things that it won't allow on a personal device - things that can be used for monitoring.
P2p2detar4 小时前
> wildly intrusive monitoring.
Like what for example? They can’t access any chat messages or app data. Even your location is impossible to obtain without your knowledge.
ALal_borland1 天前
Where I work, in Michigan, people used to be compensated if they were called for on-call work. Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing.
I used to get called a lot, when my boss also ran the critical incident team. These days, I don’t get called much, the there is always a looming threat. I miss the days when being done with work meant that I was actually done with work.
SOsokoloff1 天前
> Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing.
If Alex was previously on-call from time to time and got a raise to account for that typical amount of on-call, it sounds like you think that's fair? (It does sound fair to me.) Then, Bailey is hired at the same exact pay as Alex and also has to occasionally be on-call. Is Bailey truly "getting nothing"? Is Alex's pay fair and Bailey's identical pay unfair? I don't think so.
If you want to pass a law that requires employers to divide up pay differently than they currently do, that's totally fine; in some corner cases, it will result in a net pay increase for lower-paid employees.
ALal_borland1 天前
Over 15 years it all gets lost. When they made the change, I was on a team that didn’t do on-call, because we were 24x7, so our pay remained the same. Eventually I got a new role, also without on-call. One day the boss thought it would be a good idea if we start doing on-call support. There was no pay adjustment for this, no new job I applied for where on-call was part of the deal I signed up for. It just happened.
It could be called an edge case, but when the on-call pay is built into the base salary, it creates the expectation that a person is never off the clock and no time is truly their own. It also removes the incentive to minimize on-call work.
SOsokoloff1 天前
It gets lost in both directions, though. If you get paid 100 total units now for the value you bring to your company, how do you know that you wouldn’t get 95 units base and 5 units of on-call for the identical value that you create?
ALal_borland1 天前
That works as a thought experiment. Though I think someone getting 5 units for on-call will be less annoyed by on-call than someone only getting their base pay, even if it all shakes out to be at the same at the end of the day.
With the 5 units, if they work more, they get more. With base pay only, every time that phone rings their hourly rate drops.
It may just be optics, but optics make a difference.
TAtarellel1 天前
I don’t live in Michigan but my employer gives you close to 1k extra a month and pays for your phone an internet bill for being on call.
They generally let people volunteer to be on call. But since everyone wants their weekends and evening it’s usually the same person. One of the other devs and I have been on primary rotation for about 2 1/2 years now. It’s a shame more employees don’t compensate for on call better. And honestly our teams on call is not a regular occurrence it’s maybe once every 2 weeks we’ll get a call for something that’s a 5 minute fix.
KEKennyBlanken1 天前
A similar enshittification has happened in my state regarding wages. They slightly increased minimum wage but then stripped out extra pay on Sundays.
It's happening all the time. Lobbied legislators will give some token QoL improvement for the masses and then give the 0.1% a nice big gimme in return.
LPlpolovets1 天前
I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. For example when I was an engineer 15-20 years ago, my friends would deprioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?
I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses:
- handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result.
- scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future.
- if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
OTotherme1231 天前
When US people come to Europe, they are shocked because indeed a business closes at 2 pm, and if you arrive at 2:05 pm it is your fault. If your contract says 9-5, you are not expected to work at 6 pm in the name of customers. The business need to hire someone to cover the evening, and customers get used to buy things in comercial hours.
Yes, some people do overtime, but society structured around the fact that workers are people too with a right to free (truly free) time, and maybe you as a customer don't have a "right" to be feed at 2 am, or to buy stuff on sundays. Even if that means we are "europoor" or customers pay higher prices, something that economic theory asserts but reality not so much.
ANannzabelle1 天前
Retail workers in the US are paid hourly and clock in and clock out to shifts, with strict rules around schedules and breaks. If a retail business has a stated closing time (say, 7pm), and you show up at 7:05 (or honestly 6:55), you will not be served.
The main detriment to quality of life of retail workers is that most of them are kept part time below the number of hours where employer health insurance is mandatory, and that most large businesses no longer do set weekly shift schedules, and instead it's algorithmically determined and random.
ENencrypted_bird1 天前
One thing that happens a LOT in retail is, say if a store closes at 10pm, a customer will walk in at 9:58pm, be there for 30 min to an hour, and employees HAVE to stay until they leave and cannot kick them out. If they do, they can get written up. Not all businesses do this obviously, but I've worked in retail long enough to have seen this happen a lot.
GEgenewitch1 天前
that's fine if the business is paying overtime for those employees, i imagine if that bumps them above 32 hours (for health coverage requirements) or over 40 hours thus requiring overtime, and it happens enough, they'll hire a minimum wage security guard to keep customers from coming in at 2 'til.
BLbluehatbrit1 天前
All of these are the problem of the business, and negatively impact the employees ability to disconnect and enjoy their free time.
If you need an executive assistant to be available in the evenings, hire evening cover. If it's not worth it to the employer pay for that cover, then why should it be on the employee to do that work for free during their time off?
Employers need to remember that employees often don't have a stake in the business. Free extra work gains them nothing, and loses them what little free time they had. That's not a trade, it's theft of time through a power imbalance.
It's reasonable for a business to pay the proper price for the full services it receives from it's staff. Businesses have proven they're unable to be fair in this regard, so it's reasonable to regulate them.
FUfunctionmouse1 天前
> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.
The only reason we get compensated at all is because of legislation. They'll pay us as little and work us as hard as they're legally and physically able to.
MAmatchbok31 天前
In exactly 0 of my hiring decisions, ever, was legislation a reason why someone is paid.
BEbeAbU1 天前
The very first paragraph in TFA says:
> ... rules on when and for what reason an employer could contact an employee outside of a normal work schedule.
This is no blanket 'thou shalt not call thy employees after hours' law.
All this is doing is preventing employers from effectively pulling a bait and switch, by implicitly expecting employees to be available 24/7 for whatever reason. If you've ever been in a situation where your boss just fucking calls you because of some asinine reason ("hey I just had an idea...) then you know how terrible it is. Nothing spoilt my weekends as much as a boss calling and I'm thinking "o shit prod is down" or whatever, and then it's just him asking on a delivery date for a feature because he's having drinks with the client now and they were asking.
Now, if there is a requirement for after hours availability, it has to be stated in the contract, and the compensation must accordingly reflect this additional requirement.
I think it's great this is happening.
LPlpolovets1 天前
IANAL so maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but my understanding of the bill (https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduce...) is that you have to compensate for the full set of hours of availability even if no work is being done? I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates).
TBH the bill is kind of unclear on this. It seems to say if the employee tells the employer they are available 5pm-9pm each day then that is ok, but if the employer asks them to be available 5pm-9pm then the employee is paid 1.5x overtime for the whole 4-hour chunk even if asked to just do a few minutes of work sometime during that chunk.
QUquadrifoliate1 天前
> I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates).
If your need is so urgent that you would fire the EA for not checking the email between 5-9pm, then you are exactly the sort of over-reaching employer that the bill is targeting. You have two options:
- You can say that the EA must check at 9pm and pay them 1.5x the hourly rate for an hour. If they don't do it, you can fire them.
- If the EA is free, they still may check and schedule between 5-9pm, but you can't fire them if they don't. You can only fire them if they don't do it correctly between the 9-5 hours. This way you don't pay any overtime, but you don't overreach either.
This seems to reasonably reflect the value you place on after-hours work.
1111235813211 天前
You really should pay for that expectation. As you describe it, the EA would not be able to schedule any evening activity that took her away from electronics for too long.
The law seems clumsy, but the principle of availability being a sacrifice by the employee is sound.
HVhvb21 天前
Legislation only exists because some people won't be good people without a stick involved. So, in general, I think your expectation is valid, but that's not what you use the stick for.
As an employee you want to be able to draw the line, and this lets you do that. When you need to do that, you're already in a pretty bad position to begin with
ANantonvs1 天前
> But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening
Thanks for making the case for laws like this.
QUquadrifoliate1 天前
Exactly, the loosey-goosey "Just do it a few times in the evening" is the real trigger here. How many times exactly?
The more you try to quantify this, the better the case for the law gets.
CUcustomguy1 天前
> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.
Then you'd still need legislation for the compensation, or it ain't happening.
> Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list.
Not allowed to require someone to pick up the phone != not allowed to call them. And I think some general sense still applies, the spirit of the law, if you will. If it happens rarely, is only about important stuff, is not taken for granted (!), I think most people wouldn't mind. If you treat a worker well and appreciate them doing something they didn't have to do, they will notice. And if they're a jerk causing grief for the company over technicalities, just because they can, you will notice, and the sooner the better.
But let's say no, you can't even look at them once they're off the clock, much less ask them anything. Then the person who fucked up the handover will never do whatever mistake lead to that again. If it was an unavoidable thing, something that just happens every now and then, a cosmic ray that flipped a bit -- why expect to be able to externalize those costs to the unpaid worker? It's part of the business, whatever that business is.
> eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
Funny how it's never the third yacht for the CEO who cannot even not look goofy on one that does that, but grandma not being called from one of her 3 jobs at 2am, that will absolutely drive costs through the roof!
Kidding aside though, you opened with
> my friends would de-prioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?
But by the end of your comment, this is a problem that raises prices for everyone? Huh? Am I missing something?
And hey, it also slightly raises salaries and lowers blood pressure for everyone. It means that when a company does something for me, I know someone wasn't mistreated to make it happen. That's just a cool thing I want as much of in my life as possible.
GAgamblor9561 天前
It may only seem like a small ask for you to tell an EA to do something afterhours but it's a significant amount of work on their end and it restricts the kind of activities they can do because you have effectively made them on call 24/7.
You're basically the reason these rules are being proposed.
THtheptip1 天前
This seems mostly good for restaurants, some concerns I had from the title seem to be handled reasonably.
It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?
Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?
SWswiftcoder1 天前
It only bans uncontracted oncall. If your job description includes on call responsibilities (and compensates for them appropriately), it doesn’t appear that would be a problem?
THtheptip1 天前
This seems to be the crux, I couldn’t find a place where the bill explicitly says, so AIUI the rule making could fall either way.
Are you “compensated for being oncall” if your contract says you may do some unspecified amount of oncall, and your pay doesn’t change if you do or don’t?
You could imagine a judge / regulator deciding either way right?
SWswiftcoder1 天前
Making companies spell this out explicitly in their contracts seems like a reasonable improvement to me
COconnicpu1 天前
If you make over $130k then you make enough that you can be worked 24/7 without violating a $15 minimum wage + 1.5x over 40 hours per week.
NInickjj1 天前
I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?
I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.
In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
SIsiliconc0w1 天前
Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes).
This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.
LOlokar1 天前
When I worked there I spent a lot of time talking teams out of a 5min commitment. It’s really crazy.
ANAnalemma_1 天前
When I quit Amazon and went to work at Google I had my mind blown by actually getting compensated to be on-call outside work hours. My coworkers shook their heads and told me I wasn't the first.
AUAurornis1 天前
> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?
It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.
I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.
More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.
BOBoxFour1 天前
It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.
Usually about covering shifts.
SPSpooky231 天前
Yeah, it’s basically cheap operators pushing problems down. My wife was in this business, and worked for a company that gave them full control.
Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business.
Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.
STstackskipton1 天前
I'm SRE/Platform, I got paged out last night because Devs apparently can't properly crash applications. Sure, I can move hours as well but my partner doesn't care that I get off at 3 on this Friday instead of 5, she has to work till 5 and my page out interrupted our outing to the movies. Not everyone life is ultra flexible.
BIBirAdam1 天前
Same here. Applications developers and QA often can't really do their jobs, so I get roped in on every problem it seems. Plans to go out with my family on my birthday? Canceled. Plans to go kayaking with my wife on Saturday? Canceled. At this point, I am extremely tempted to leave my job, sell my house, buy some land in Wyoming or something, and just be content to be poor.
NInickjj1 天前
I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change?
I've been fortunate to have a very limited amount of on-call events. At one place for 3.5 years there was 1 event. In another place there's been 2 in the last 9 months but on the bright side these events are taken seriously in the sense that dev time is immediately prioritized to hopefully prevent them from happening in the future.
All code being written gets reviewed by someone and there's an expectation tests are included. Of course that doesn't prevent all bugs, but there's an attempt at quality control by the teams producing the code.
I think part of this role (SRE / platform / DevOps / whatever you want to classify this as) is technical implementation but also coming up with systems and workflows to reduce downtime and risk when performing deployments. Not all management is open to change but IMO it should be brought up and taken seriously. There are companies out there who care about both providing value to customers while also keeping team morale high.
STstackskipton1 天前
>I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change?
IME, very few companies care they are screwing up their employees' lives. It's why these laws are good since it puts financial cost on them and gives their employees cover.
CAcadamsdotcom1 天前
You are lucky in that you don’t have the type of employer who needs to be reined in via the law.
There are some true scumbags out there.
HAHavoc1 天前
Maybe I just have abnormal leverage but I've never had after hours coms be an issue.
I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
CMcmatta1 天前
This is a pretty self-selecting group, so I'm not surprised that most people reading this don't have a problem with after-hours coms. If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage. It's irritating.
TBtbrownaw1 天前
> If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage. It's irritating.
I vaguely remember a few years ago there was some news pushing new scheduling software that was supposed to help make schedules more predictable, and how it wasn't working to full potential because store managers wouldn't trust it.
But I don't think the bill in question here would actually do anything to affect that issue?
YAyamillove1 天前
[deleted]
SHshimman1 天前
Telling people they should get a better job implies that there is work where YOU think the workers deserve to be taken advantage of. Why IDK, guessing you hate people fighting for better quality of life through democratic norms.
People rightfully hating tech workers nowadays makes so much sense.
YAyamillove1 天前
[deleted]
TBtbrownaw1 天前
> Maybe I just have abnormal leverage
It could also be a personality thing or a worldview thing.
Some people just have a hard time saying "no" in general, or are constantly looking for reasons to jump at shadows.
Or there's people teaching that the world runs on class warfare and anyone with any amount of power is always looking for an excuse to abuse that power.
TOtough1 天前
You probably have been just lucky with your bosses?
Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
SPSpooky231 天前
Your fortunate. If you’re adjacent to operations or power, after hours comms is a common experience.
YAyamillove1 天前
[deleted]
SHshimman1 天前
This is a stupid rebuttal. Society is allowed to improve the life work workers while working. Just because you want people to personally suffer doesn't make it right.
This is some old school puritan classism right here.
YAyamillove1 天前
“ because you want people to personally suffer”
I never said I want people to suffer. I think your position is stupid because it will cause suffering through layoffs.
Very rarely has government intervention worked recently. But I guess you think these workers are stupid too and can’t take care of themselves.
Just get off their backs, I promise you they can handle without your performative outrage.
“ Society is allowed to improve the life work workers while working”
This is not society doing anything. This is literally a politician that is advocating for government intervention in the economy.
SPSpooky231 天前
Not always.
I found myself in a job with golden handcuffs that made it difficult to leave, which went from the best job of my life to a nightmare on earth when a key leader passed away and replaced by someone whose sociopathy was one of his better attributes.
His insane pace put my boss in the hospital from the stress.
YAyamillove1 天前
[deleted]
NUnunez1 天前
Loads of jobs where this is expected: sales, education, hospitality, definitely the entertainment industry, etc.
DBdboreham1 天前
As an employer (in the US) I have always had the impression that I'd risk being on the hook for overtime or some other form of additional compensation if I routinely engaged in communication with employees out of hours, so unless the place was on fire I never did. As an "employee" (contractor) I managed my own hours and adopted a pragmatic approach: if the client was paying $$$ I'd respond if it didn't interfere with my personal life, unless they were being dickish about it, in which case I'd bring it up as an issue and if necessary drop the client.
CEcebert1 天前
Direct link to the bill: https://legislature.mi.gov/Bills/Bill?ObjectName=2026-SB-094...
WHwhatever11 天前
In America the definition of at will employment is so broad that employee exploitation is not covered. Technically you sign you will work at least 40 hours per week. So 120 hours is fine by the law. And if you die at work, hey it was your choice.
Now on the opposite side, I also understand that there can be a handful of cases in a year where you really need to work outside the work hours, law should not be making businesses so inflexible that they are doomed to fail.
SESE5pc3JhY2lzdA1 天前
I suppose if the position requires it, like being on call, companies will just avoid Michigan workers and either out source, or hire remotely in another state.
I'm originally from Michigan and have worked at lots of different jobs. I rarely ever was required to respond after hours, and if I did, it was part of my job (and explained to me in detail when I accepted the position).
Does this apply to Doctors and Nurses?
BObob10291 天前
I've worked for more than one small company that has an unstated policy to not hire employees who live in CA or NY. It sounds like MI might wind up on that list. I know of certain employees who reside in that state right now who are pulling ridiculous hours just to keep the business alive. None of them were forced into it or are otherwise unhappy with the circumstances they find themselves in. I've had many opportunities to re-enter the W2 labor pool and decided to stay out in the high seas.
Many moons ago, when I signed up to work at Samsung Austin Semiconductor they told me I might be responsible for odd hours. I agreed to this and had a pager strapped to my body until the day I quit the job 3 years later. No one seems to get weird about a doctor-style pager ripping employees out of slumber at 2am. The only time I got a break from the pager is when I was on a 777 on my way to South Korea. Then I got a new kind of pager when I arrived. Somehow teams messages and outlook are super evil by comparison to this.
HIhintymad1 天前
That means tech companies won't hire engineers in Michigan if they are required to be oncall, as many such engineers rotate their oncall schedules?
NUnunez1 天前
Getting a separate phone and phone number for work has been one of the biggest quality of life improvements for my work life balance.
It's a small change in the macro, but doing this enabled me to (a) choose the device I want, (b) keep work stuff off of my personal phone, and, most importantly, (c) COMPLETELY disconnect from work when the day is done. This became necessary after COVID induced WFH forced work into the home and expectations around being "on" all of the time became more pervasive.
That said, "Work Profile" is one of Android's best features, and I'd love for iOS to have something equivalent. It's not as good as a physical separation, but it's the next best thing.
ELelevation1 天前
A friend with an iPhone runs his a couple businesses with the Quo app (nee OpenPhone) which allows him to manage calls/sms for multiple business numbers from his personal phone while allowing him to automatically disable ringing after 5pm when he leaves the office to be a family man.
My problem is that my customers prefer to reach me over iMessage, and porting my number to any "business phone in an app" means I'd be downgrading to unreliable SMS in a green bubble. So if I want to separate work/personal use, I'd need to carry a second iPhone.
OAoatmeal11 天前
> But in general, should this bill become law in Michigan, an employer could not require an employee to access or respond to work-related matters outside of their assigned hours... Violations could be reported to the state's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with fines to the company and/or overtime pay to the employee among the possible results.
It will be too easy for employers to say to the DOL the employee was not actually required to respond to the work-related matter when they told the employee they are expected to. Laws like these don't solve problems (bargaining power disparity caused by a variety of factors), they solve symptoms. It may not have a significant effect.
TBtbrownaw1 天前
How would this interact with existing rules around exempt / non-exempt (roughly, salaried vs hourly) employees?
I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
TPtptacek1 天前
It doesn't. As drafted it applies to exempt employees. (It's just a proposed bill; it's unlikely to happen and if it picked up any steam presumably it would be drafted more carefully.)
ELElProlactin1 天前
While I don't disagree with the intent, the reality is that workers are already at a significant disadvantage and many don't feel they have the leverage to be more firm about boundaries (with most of them feeling this way being correct about their lack of leverage).
Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
CAcadamsdotcom1 天前
While I understand how you can see it this way, laws like this have worked in many other places (yes some of those were places where employers had fewer options to move interstate, but that’s a costly thing to do for employers)
It does actually work - think of it like a speed limit. If everyone is forced to go at a certain maximum speed (ie. the same max no. of contact hours per week per employee) then it’s not a (relative) loss if a business can’t operate at “full capacity” for more hours than its competitors.
ELElProlactin1 天前
I won't say that laws like this can't have any impact, but it's a global marketplace and change is constant.
Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.
Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.
Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".
It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
THthrowaway858251 天前
Companies that desire on call need to be willing to pay an hourly rate for 24 hours of possible labor.
GBgblargg1 天前
At least an ongoing retainer fee, plus paying for time spent dealing with comms.
THthrowaway858251 天前
Lots of in office people aren't doing work 100% of the time, they still get paid because they could be asked to do something. Same goes for on call, just with a flipped percentage.
Further for non fixed work schedules any shifts that aren't scheduled two weeks in advance should be paid overtime.
SHshimman1 天前
Why is the onus on workers to make sure they are working 100.00% of the time? It's not their company, they aren't management. If you want them to cosplay as managers maybe pay them as such rather than trying to pit them amongst each other.
UNunknown1 天前
[deleted]
GEgenewitch1 天前
i can't figure out what some of the commentary here is borne from. "you're not working 100% of the time so it's ok if they ask you to work outside of normal hours" is sadistic.
HEheadz1 天前
It kind of baffles me that this needs to be a bill. I guess I'm lucky that I've never worked for a company that required me to be constantly online. (I work remotely for a US company, work European working hours, and nobody requires me to be online outside of them.)
GEgeetee1 天前
I've worked at companies that don't outright require it, but they utilize a few workaholic employees to set an expectation sane people can't live up to. It creates a stressful environment where expectations are unclear. Combine that with the current job market and you effectively hold your employees hostage.
JAjackfischer22 小时前
Ultimately companies don't exist for the employees they exist to deliver something to the customers that rely on you. Stress and uncertainty are part of work and life. Why should that come before the people you're serving?
GEgeetee17 小时前
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
TOtoomuchtodo1 天前
You are lucky. This bill is for the unlucky, because luck is not a strategy as it relates to labor rights and protections.
HEheadz1 天前
Yeah, now I see that my message came out a bit differently than I wanted it to. What I wanted to say is that it sucks this needs to be a law instead of just being common sense.
TOtoomuchtodo1 天前
Absolutely sucks, but it’s where we’re at, so it must be done. If your policy isn’t law, it doesn’t exist except as a suggestion.
Personally, I was very lucky. I recognize it was almost all luck. Born at the right place to the right people. Opportunities I was lucky to have because of that. Winning when gambling on relationships, professional work, and in the capital markets. I advocate for unlucky people whenever possible, because humans who did not choose to be here should not suffer due to their poor luck.
“We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” —- Maurice Allais
GBgblargg1 天前
I'm fine if they want to give me extra work when I'm not on the job. I round up to the hour, so choose your after-hours emails wisely.
评论
20 条顶层评论请先登录 h4cker 账号，然后连接 Hacker News 后发表评论。
There's a weird incuriosity in the responses here for a place that calls itself Hacker News. "This doesn't happen to me" is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them. Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. Every good hack comes from understanding the world well enough to see the hack in the first place - someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift.
I think "this doesn't happen to me" is a valid response. We're all here sharing. I find the internet full of panic and fear and negativity these days and it overstates how pervasive a thing is. Example: I travel to Disney World sometimes. There's a recent hubub about transportation and the blame is all on "OMG THE INFLUENCERS ARE EVERYWHERE". In those situations it's interesting how many people will spread those stories about influencers saturating the park / causing problems and yet ... most every user who replies "I've never seen one at the park". Everyone's experience is valid IMO. Everyone gets to express their lived experience. There used to be a lot of "abusive start up demands massive hours" talk on HN. I actually think people expressing how it isn't that way everywhere / doesn't have to be that way is VERY helpful. Folks in those situations now know that maybe they have options.
While abusive work environments may not be the norm for the majority of people, this being a law will benefit everyone. Saying this doesn't happen to you in threads like this just signifies that you don't care, you basically downplay other people's bad experiences because well, it doesn't concern you. You may not be affected now but you never know when it will happen to you or to someone close to you, and you would be glad that such law exists protecting you.
> ... this being a law will benefit everyone. If it were national, sure. As is, companies will see Michigan as a bad place to hire people, which was probably not the goal.
Its valid but useless. Think someone says i'm thirsty all the time because there's little clean water available, what's available is expensive but it could be better if we did so-and-so. and someone replies I'm not thirsty.
It’s impossible for a lizard to convince a sheepdog to turn up the thermostat. It’s impossible for a sheepdog to convince a lizard to turn down the thermostat. Which one is right?
The two things you have commented on are not equivalent. One person offers insight and the other reacts. Such a reaction is inherently on a different plane than a original statement, because you chose to make it about yourself, in the presence of another persons slice of their reality. To give a crass example: A: I had a shitty day, they took my dog and killed it B: Well, *my* dog is still alive To which I would say: Congrats on telegraphing to the world you are a self-centered asshole that wouldn't recognize the concept of empathy if it jumped into their face.
Counterpoint: anecdotal evidence is sometimes actively harmful and you should consider not sharing it in certain situations. I know, some people have the reflexive urge to make every situation about themselves, but I think you should instead be aware that (1) your own experience is not necessarily representative of the broader reality and (2) even if it is may distract from the topic being discussed. Don't get me wrong, everybodies lived experience is in fact valid. And yet that doesn't mean it is appropriate to share it at all times. If your friend tells you their newborn died during childbirth telling them: "Well mine didn't" would be actively abusive behavior. If someone tells you an intimate story about how being poor affected them as a child, there are certain ways to share your experience of how your parents always bought you everything you wanted that productively add to the topic and others that distract from it. Always remember that everybody just sharing their experience is a different thing from you reacting on some others experience. What may be a fun anecdote for you, may be a life-defining experience for others. Aside from these examples anecdotal evidence can be destructive if it ignores that the plural of anecdotes is not data.
This is the media equivalent of showing a family swimming on the lake when discussing heatwave death. You have valid life experience but it’s not relevant to the topic at hand.
It's relevant. We're people sharing and discussing, not a TV show. The idea that if we're discussing a problem that only people with that problem may share their experience is absurd at face value.
"10% of Americans are uninsured. A US state is pushing to insure all of their residents." "I'm insured!" "Open-source software projects are being spammed with LLM generated PRs. Contributions are becoming more restricted". "I have a repo that isn't being spammed!" Sometimes sharing a somewhat related experience is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and also completely uninteresting. It does not matter that somehow their "experience is valid".
[deleted]
"Privilege is thinking that something isn't a problem because it doesn't affect you personally." is a sticker I bought once.
I've never bought a sticker like that.
I haven't either. I'm honestly questioning how many resources are being wasting on bumper stickers we don't buy. Is this why I couldn't find the sticker I wanted last week?
Well, I have many stickers I like.
What if you did?
Thanks for the laugh.
Teachers have it the worst. For many of them, there is no way to do the job right without bringing work home and being available after hours. Tech sales can be just as bad. This is more understandable, but if customers didn't work outside of work hours, sales folks wouldn't need to either (since speed outside of work would no longer be an advantage).
Are there particular responses you have in mind? I can find two comments making this point, one which opens with >Maybe I just have abnormal leverage while the other opens with >I'm curious The top two top-level comments are responding to this trend, so I assume it is or was present, but I'm not seeing it. I do wish people would reply to the comments they find objectionable instead of doing these meta comments subtweeting them because I find I run into this issue often lately here (pot-kettle objection noted and accurate).
Long ago I once participated on a forum where meta conversation about the conversation was not allowed. It really did a nice job to avoid the kind of (often way off) meta comments about other comments that come up like this. It's telling if someone can't actually find a comment to reply to in order to address whatever meta issue they're concerned about.
I think there's two things I'd point to here - The first is that, by the standards of the world at large, this is a relatively homogeneous community. It is still a wildly diverse community, that's one of the things that makes it valuable, but in the same way that psychology has a WEIRD[1] problem, Hacker News is homogeneous - we're more likely, as a community, to not include a viewpoint sampled at random from humanity than to include it. That points towards the second, which is that there's a tendency within this group where, when a news article comes up or a law is proposed or an academic study is posted in which some factor of human life is discussed ("X% of people experience food scarcity", "Y state bill would bar employers from Z", "B in C people are genetic carriers for Q"), to discuss it from our own viewpoint - "My cousin who experienced food scarcity was a klepto," "my employer tried to call me off hours and I didn't answer," "my cousin died from Q." This is both intensely human and often fairly useless here, because of point one above. I am a straight white male who grew up in a house whose affluence varied but never dropped below sustenance who's worked in tech my entire life. I have parts of myself that are genuinely different, where I feel I can genuinely provide new information to the group (I've had heart surgery, for instance), but by and large, if I share my experience with this group, it's to commiserate with colleagues. I am part of this community; things which seem strange to me are more likely than not to be outside this broader community's lived experiences as well. So my critique here, broadly, is that we as a professed group of hackers - as a group of people who've self-labeled as curious - have a bad tendency to read things that indicate an experience of life that we haven't or don't have (in this case, that someone could be unable to deny their employer after-hours comms) and focus on our own experiences, rather than recognizing that we're being provided an opportunity to expand our understanding of the possible states of the world or the possibilities of being for people in this world. It's understandable and deeply human that we would do so - we're social creatures, and community building is in part an act of expressing and validating commonality - but for a group whose self-identity is curiosity, to respond to evidence of someone else's lived experience by reiterating our own lived experience when that experience is likely to be within that of the broader group present is... well, it just takes up space. (By the way, this is the point in the post where I'm going to nod towards my neurodivergent brethren: when I say below "we," if the point I'm making doesn't apply to you, understand that if you were in a room with you, me, and 10 wolves, and I said "there's too many wolves in this room," and you responded "well I'm not a wolf," I would agree with you and that wouldn't change my point.) We are, broadly, a privileged group. Broadly, the people on this forum have remarkable market power. Broadly, the people on this forum are wealthy. Broadly, the people on this forum are educated. If, when you comment on a thread, you are expressing a part of your lived experience that broadly coincides with the lived experience of the median person on this forum, _you are not adding to the discussion._ You're not expanding the discussion. You're not helping people learn. You're not, yourself, learning. If you read something on this forum and think, "weird, that's not how I experience the world," think to yourself "Am I adding to this discussion by saying that?" 1. https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/spow8trw/release/1
I think in many cases this has less to do with incuriosity and more to do with denial.
> Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model. ...than it does for you, which means there's an opportunity for someone to expend resources verifying and characterizing the claimed difference.
It’s easy to dismiss something by saying “it’s not been my experience”. It would be a huge waste of time if every such claim requires expending resources verifying and characterizing the difference. There should be a higher bar for discourse on HN.
The comment I was replying to appears to be a call for unquestioning belief. Which is the far extreme in the opposite direction.
No, it doesn't, or at the very least, that wasn't my read and I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation. The comment starts with the topic, shock at the lack of curiosity from a group happy to comment in the theme of news interesting to hackers, and concludes with an argument that someone sharing their life/experience is something valuable. IMO, the only reasonable argument one could take, is that roughly believes hackers should be curious, and that if you want to treat humans with the respect they deserve as individuals, you should default to trying to believe what they say, listening when they try to communicate, and avoid ignoring what they're trying to communicate just so you can interject something unrelated about yourself. I not only agree, but I'm glad someone took a moment to encourage treating others with respect.
Assume good faith. Don’t cross examine.
Not at all.
Despite dang and others saying x or y about Hacker News and how such and such is a noob opinion—-the people themselves, the demographic, has changed and I’ve seen it over the years.
Have the thought leaders been replaced with confused people???
> someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift. I'm not sure about that, but to your higher point, HN hasn't taken pride in it's nominative determinism nature, nor does it appear to be a desired trait from the majority. But the continued enshittifcation aside, "it doesn't happen to me" is still a useful observation. That shouldn't be read as a refutation, because I already agree with your point. The intent of most of the comments your objecting to, likely does come from a narcissistic compulsion, to turn the topic to something about them. But I could easily say "it doesn't happen to me" while (poorly) trying to convey a message of encouragement towards self-confidence, and self-worth. Rather, it doesn't happen to me, because I haven't been gaslit into the shared and common delusion that: if you get fired, it'll because of something you did, and not because your manager felt like it. "Employee didn't answer the call/message at 10pm" is the reason they'll invent to fire you after they've decided to fire you. It won't be the root cause. You can just turn your messages off, and nothing bad will happen because you didn't respond. Are there dysfunctional companies where something like that will get you fired? Absolutely! I would have hoped that existing wrongful termination laws would have already prevented this kinda thing, (if they don't that's a much larger problem) but I have no objections to making this an explicit law to compel the behavior of the sub-human group that would rather mistreat their coworkers. But given that within places that behave like this, this law would only fix a small subset of the pervasive human rights abuses inflicted during non-working hours. I feel like something more expansive should be done to protect those people from clearly abusive behavior. I still expect that the vast majority of the people that would benefit from this, could simply just turn their phone off, and no one would notice... because while it's a problem, that does happen to some people, one that needs to be fixed! It doesn't happen to me, and probably doesn't really happen to you (most people) either.
Lots of privilege in this thread showing. This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today". Please remember that just because you aren't expected to have consistent unpaid after-hours comms doesn't mean that others don't. Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
Most of the roles I've had involved irregular and long hours. In most cases, I've been happy to take these roles. The article isn't clear how exactly this is intended to work. I think no surprise hours that aren't recognized in the terms of employment makes sense. But also I think I should be able to agree to being available if I am willing to be. Remote Michigan tech workers already have enough trouble as tech companies insist on returning to office.
If long and irregular hours are expected, then those hours should be tracked and paid out at a rate. Companies absolutely abuse salary exemptions and it’s getting ridiculous. If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly employee. Not a salary one. You might be called a salary employee. But no, you’re working as an hourly employee. If companies expect you to be on call, that’s great. Pay an on call hourly rate. Problem solved. But you can’t just take a salary employee, treat them like they work at McDonald’s and then pay a base bi weekly salary. That’s not okay IMO.
If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. If that isn't amenable to you, don't agree to it. Why does this government need to butt in?
Do remember that without the government, there very literally would be no forty-hour work week. Individuals don’t have the same bargaining power as employers, not by a long-shot.
The government needs to butt in because this arrangement doesn’t benefit the employer. They would prefer you “clock in” while still receiving a salary exempt pay check. So, why would they do something that works against them? Think about it. Do you go out of your way to advocate against yourself? No, right? So why would you expect them to do that? It’s just not a reasonable expectation. Now, they might still do it anyway. Great, but you can’t expect that. So, we need to curb the incentives to get the desired behavior. It’s just the dynamics of human behavior. Companies aren’t some magical beast - they, too, fact the push and pull of human behavior and incentives.
Again to my point, there is a lot of "I" in your comment. What this legislation means is that on aggregate, the politicians sponsoring are hearing from their constituents that they are being overworked via expectations of off-hours communication. This might not be the case with you. > If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. Why does this government need to butt in? This legislation...does not affect you then. All it's saying is that the employer cannot require you to respond to something on 9pm on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday unless you are paid for it. You are still free to do so, it's just that your employer can't fire you if you don't. This seems sort of reasonable to me.
Oh I've known from back my food service days that "management" aka salary was a fucking scam. It was ALWAYS a way to get massive unpaid overtime extracted upon threat of firing. And overtime for workers was inexcusable, no matter what. Got a rush? Too fucking bad, clock out. These days professionally, I agreed to 40h/week. That's what they get. If there's a real outage or un-manufactured crisis, then I'll stick around. But its comp time for the week. I don't work for free for capitalists. If they want more labor, they can pay for more.
> I don't work for free for capitalists. What's your opinion on [cuck licensing](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708655)?
Same. For my role I need to be able to be on hands after 5 here and there, and I knew that going in and works great for me because of the level I’m at. But absolutely employees should have the full choice without coercion or fear of repercussions.
This is simple. You're on call, you're paid to be on call. Anyone accepting anything different is encouraging this behaviour. Unionize and this goes away.
[deleted]
> a lot of people who are victims of Are there statistics somewhere about what percent of people in various roles get asked but know they're safe declining, or mistakenly think they can't decline, or correctly think they'd get in trouble for declining, or don't get asked but think they have to anyway?
I can recommend the documentary Office Space, it goes into great detail about this.
> It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other. Laws like this often happen in the states first, if/when they catch on, it puts pressure on the federal government; often to avoid the confusion of 50 different variations on the law.
Why is this a government issue at all? It was unclear from the article why some contingent that doesn't like their relationship with their employer ought to be able to inflict their solution on everyone in Michigan via politics as the mechanism instead of the market
Government regulation around conditions of employment has a very long history, because "the market" has a long history of producing things like Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire when it's allowed to. While in theory the market punishes bad employers by making people not want to work for them, the reality is that for all but the most in-demand individuals, the power asymmetry between an individual and their employer is such that some level of government regulation is probably needed to maintain reasonable working conditions. You could certainly argue whether regulating this particular thing is a good idea or not of course.
Broadly agreed. But the triangle shirtwaist factory is about as far from "my boss calls me and it's stressful" as one can get! I'm disappointed that a some activists can inflict their preference for comfort on all of us.
> Why is this a government issue at all? For the same reason anything is a government issue, i.e. that we regulate acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as a society, and periodically adjust what we find acceptable? If your employer starts dumping large amounts of trash on your property tomorrow and says "oh that's just part of our relationship with you", I bet you'll want to get the government involved real quick because you never agreed to this.
The line of what rises to the level of "solve it with force", eg solve it with legal intervention, is understandably blurry. But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so. This OTOH is a private aspect of the employee employer relationship and not exactly a human rights abuse like some of the pearl clutching comments here suggest FWIW writing as someone who went through and goes through very intense on call and all hours availability and firefighting for weeks on end, something I chose voluntarily. I don't want anyone interfering with my ability to choose that and accomplish what we accomplished.
If you signed a contract to do all-hours firefighting, this still doesn't affect that. > But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so. That's exactly what this legislation is doing. All it's saying is, if you want off-hours work, make it explicit rather than implicit. If you fire people by expecting firefighting when it's not specified in the contract, you will break the law.
The proposed bill would still allow you to choose to be on-call. Your boss just has to compensate you for your time explicitly when it falls outside of agreed hours, instead of getting an implicit claim to your entire life by virtue of your employment agreement.
Government is meant, in part, to give some amount of power & push-back to the least among us. Representative government is the solution we arrived at after we decided it was kinda shitty to just kill each other. Why are you trying to deny people the representation they deserve and prevent the government from doing something people might want? Seems like some ideologically-based bullshit to me.
_Some_ people _might_ want - and a very privileged something at that! This is not west virginia coal wars. Why do a handful of ideologues get to insert themselves in the employee employer relationship for something so tame?
one of the most common in lower paying jobs is just CONSTANT scheduling churn, group texts with the entire restaurant/bar you're supposed to on. Instead of having a normal schedule everything is ad hoc
i heard, long ago, there's a reason for that. it can't be the nonsense it looks like since so many established places use ad-hoc scheduling, it appears. I like the other kind of ad-hoc scheduling, which is i roll in when i get in, and take lunch when i get hungry, and leave when traffic has cleared up.
Buddha was exceptional because he actually WANTED to know what was going on outside of his luxury palace. Most people just want to pretend everything is fine. They sleep better at night.
This is the equivalent of "what global warming, it was so cold today" Conversely, I've seen the latest heat wave in France to try to justify global warming all over HN comments, when the reality is that this is temperature and not climate. "Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other." If someone that worked for me is unwilling to help out in these situations occasionally, I wouldn't make them do anything (and follow the law). I also wouldn't promote them. Many higher level positions require a certain level of responsibility, and this would just show me that the person can't handle it. I do agree though. If this law were in Michigan and I had a company here, any job that required after hours communication would be outsourced to another state or country.
One instance of weather is not climate, but climate dictates variance in weather.
do you pay overtime for helping out?
Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times. I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping. I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times. Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
Check out Buzzkill, its a great app for managing notification rules. You can set it to hide and batch up notifications during your off hours and show them later.
I use 2 different email apps for exactly this reason. I can check my work email if I need to, but I don’t want notifications.
> Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.
This is still a thing on Android if your work account is a Google account and uses the Work profile feature. You can pause all apps in the Work profile on a schedule (or on demand), so it includes any work apps you might have in addition to email.
Second phone?
Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.
Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?
My IT department and I fully support staff requesting YubiKeys, there’s no concept of being a “troublemaker” for having boundaries and respecting security requirements. I’d talk to your IT management if your company culture seems different, I bet the actual techs do not have an issue with this.
> Where do you draw the line? If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device". My private phone is not for their use, ever.
I'm happy to be the "troublemaker". In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
One of the biggest banks in the US forces staff and contractors alike to install a proprietary 2fa app on their personal devices. if you can get a company phone, you can't finish activating the MDM, to install the company 2fa app, without first using that 2fa app on your personal device. Even a company yubikey can't be activated without the 2fa appp, which again, you can't get on a company device without first installing it on your personal device.
if the company wants to identify me by my phone, they have to take control over the phone. eg. a rooted android can screw with their app that means they need to provide it
Yes. That is where you draw the line. Work use of your personal device. Why is this so hard to imagine? If you're working somewhere where not donating resources to your employer means you are a troublemaker, it's time to find new work.
They can buy a USB Fido token. I've had this argument with employers in the past; some states have laws that require the employer compensate employees for requiring the use of their personal mobile device, even for something as simple as MFA. There's no such thing as a free lunch: if you want to require an employee do something, you must be willing to pay for that capability. Ethically, I think all employers should be held to this standard. Legally, anyone who employs people in California, Montana, and I think Massachusetts must be aware of that standard.
I would install the app on the shittiest iPhone backup i have (I must have like 10 iPhones by now, i dont sell old ones) You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP) Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.
If its a standards compliant TOTP 2fa, I don't have any issue in adding those to my app. If its the terrible MS authenticator or DUO, then get me a device.
Having to lug 2 phones around has always seemed like more trouble than it's worth to me. I also don't like having multiple devices to do stuff that a single one could do, for environmental reasons, but that's not a very wide-spread opinion. So I do have work stuff on my personal phone, but with no notifications whatsoever. Only works because I'm in a position where it's acceptable to require all communications to go through emails or messaging apps though.
I'm not worried about notifications on my personal phone, I just don't want to install anything work related there. I don't want them to have even a tiny bit of chance of having access to my personal data, photos, browsing, anything Im with GP, absolutely no work stuff on my personal phone
> Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I’m torn. I’d prefer the 2nd phone, but at some point it’s not worth arguing about. If they are paying enough I just mentally subtract the cost from my comp.
I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night.
If a device is owned by a corporate entity it becomes trivial for them to engage in wildly intrusive monitoring. For example, if Apple can verify the device was purchased by a corporate entity and then enrolled in an mobile device management system, it will allow a lot of things that it won't allow on a personal device - things that can be used for monitoring.
> wildly intrusive monitoring. Like what for example? They can’t access any chat messages or app data. Even your location is impossible to obtain without your knowledge.
Where I work, in Michigan, people used to be compensated if they were called for on-call work. Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing. I used to get called a lot, when my boss also ran the critical incident team. These days, I don’t get called much, the there is always a looming threat. I miss the days when being done with work meant that I was actually done with work.
> Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing. If Alex was previously on-call from time to time and got a raise to account for that typical amount of on-call, it sounds like you think that's fair? (It does sound fair to me.) Then, Bailey is hired at the same exact pay as Alex and also has to occasionally be on-call. Is Bailey truly "getting nothing"? Is Alex's pay fair and Bailey's identical pay unfair? I don't think so. If you want to pass a law that requires employers to divide up pay differently than they currently do, that's totally fine; in some corner cases, it will result in a net pay increase for lower-paid employees.
Over 15 years it all gets lost. When they made the change, I was on a team that didn’t do on-call, because we were 24x7, so our pay remained the same. Eventually I got a new role, also without on-call. One day the boss thought it would be a good idea if we start doing on-call support. There was no pay adjustment for this, no new job I applied for where on-call was part of the deal I signed up for. It just happened. It could be called an edge case, but when the on-call pay is built into the base salary, it creates the expectation that a person is never off the clock and no time is truly their own. It also removes the incentive to minimize on-call work.
It gets lost in both directions, though. If you get paid 100 total units now for the value you bring to your company, how do you know that you wouldn’t get 95 units base and 5 units of on-call for the identical value that you create?
That works as a thought experiment. Though I think someone getting 5 units for on-call will be less annoyed by on-call than someone only getting their base pay, even if it all shakes out to be at the same at the end of the day. With the 5 units, if they work more, they get more. With base pay only, every time that phone rings their hourly rate drops. It may just be optics, but optics make a difference.
I don’t live in Michigan but my employer gives you close to 1k extra a month and pays for your phone an internet bill for being on call. They generally let people volunteer to be on call. But since everyone wants their weekends and evening it’s usually the same person. One of the other devs and I have been on primary rotation for about 2 1/2 years now. It’s a shame more employees don’t compensate for on call better. And honestly our teams on call is not a regular occurrence it’s maybe once every 2 weeks we’ll get a call for something that’s a 5 minute fix.
A similar enshittification has happened in my state regarding wages. They slightly increased minimum wage but then stripped out extra pay on Sundays. It's happening all the time. Lobbied legislators will give some token QoL improvement for the masses and then give the 0.1% a nice big gimme in return.
I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. For example when I was an engineer 15-20 years ago, my friends would deprioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well? I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses: - handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result. - scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future. - if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.
When US people come to Europe, they are shocked because indeed a business closes at 2 pm, and if you arrive at 2:05 pm it is your fault. If your contract says 9-5, you are not expected to work at 6 pm in the name of customers. The business need to hire someone to cover the evening, and customers get used to buy things in comercial hours. Yes, some people do overtime, but society structured around the fact that workers are people too with a right to free (truly free) time, and maybe you as a customer don't have a "right" to be feed at 2 am, or to buy stuff on sundays. Even if that means we are "europoor" or customers pay higher prices, something that economic theory asserts but reality not so much.
Retail workers in the US are paid hourly and clock in and clock out to shifts, with strict rules around schedules and breaks. If a retail business has a stated closing time (say, 7pm), and you show up at 7:05 (or honestly 6:55), you will not be served. The main detriment to quality of life of retail workers is that most of them are kept part time below the number of hours where employer health insurance is mandatory, and that most large businesses no longer do set weekly shift schedules, and instead it's algorithmically determined and random.
One thing that happens a LOT in retail is, say if a store closes at 10pm, a customer will walk in at 9:58pm, be there for 30 min to an hour, and employees HAVE to stay until they leave and cannot kick them out. If they do, they can get written up. Not all businesses do this obviously, but I've worked in retail long enough to have seen this happen a lot.
that's fine if the business is paying overtime for those employees, i imagine if that bumps them above 32 hours (for health coverage requirements) or over 40 hours thus requiring overtime, and it happens enough, they'll hire a minimum wage security guard to keep customers from coming in at 2 'til.
All of these are the problem of the business, and negatively impact the employees ability to disconnect and enjoy their free time. If you need an executive assistant to be available in the evenings, hire evening cover. If it's not worth it to the employer pay for that cover, then why should it be on the employee to do that work for free during their time off? Employers need to remember that employees often don't have a stake in the business. Free extra work gains them nothing, and loses them what little free time they had. That's not a trade, it's theft of time through a power imbalance. It's reasonable for a business to pay the proper price for the full services it receives from it's staff. Businesses have proven they're unable to be fair in this regard, so it's reasonable to regulate them.
> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. The only reason we get compensated at all is because of legislation. They'll pay us as little and work us as hard as they're legally and physically able to.
In exactly 0 of my hiring decisions, ever, was legislation a reason why someone is paid.
The very first paragraph in TFA says: > ... rules on when and for what reason an employer could contact an employee outside of a normal work schedule. This is no blanket 'thou shalt not call thy employees after hours' law. All this is doing is preventing employers from effectively pulling a bait and switch, by implicitly expecting employees to be available 24/7 for whatever reason. If you've ever been in a situation where your boss just fucking calls you because of some asinine reason ("hey I just had an idea...) then you know how terrible it is. Nothing spoilt my weekends as much as a boss calling and I'm thinking "o shit prod is down" or whatever, and then it's just him asking on a delivery date for a feature because he's having drinks with the client now and they were asking. Now, if there is a requirement for after hours availability, it has to be stated in the contract, and the compensation must accordingly reflect this additional requirement. I think it's great this is happening.
IANAL so maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but my understanding of the bill (https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintroduce...) is that you have to compensate for the full set of hours of availability even if no work is being done? I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates). TBH the bill is kind of unclear on this. It seems to say if the employee tells the employer they are available 5pm-9pm each day then that is ok, but if the employer asks them to be available 5pm-9pm then the employee is paid 1.5x overtime for the whole 4-hour chunk even if asked to just do a few minutes of work sometime during that chunk.
> I.e. if I ask an EA to check email a few times between 5pm and 9pm and schedule anything that seems urgent, that's probably 1-10 minutes of work on most days, but the bill would require the EA be paid for 4 hours (at overtime rates). If your need is so urgent that you would fire the EA for not checking the email between 5-9pm, then you are exactly the sort of over-reaching employer that the bill is targeting. You have two options: - You can say that the EA must check at 9pm and pay them 1.5x the hourly rate for an hour. If they don't do it, you can fire them. - If the EA is free, they still may check and schedule between 5-9pm, but you can't fire them if they don't. You can only fire them if they don't do it correctly between the 9-5 hours. This way you don't pay any overtime, but you don't overreach either. This seems to reasonably reflect the value you place on after-hours work.
You really should pay for that expectation. As you describe it, the EA would not be able to schedule any evening activity that took her away from electronics for too long. The law seems clumsy, but the principle of availability being a sacrifice by the employee is sound.
Legislation only exists because some people won't be good people without a stick involved. So, in general, I think your expectation is valid, but that's not what you use the stick for. As an employee you want to be able to draw the line, and this lets you do that. When you need to do that, you're already in a pretty bad position to begin with
> But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening Thanks for making the case for laws like this.
Exactly, the loosey-goosey "Just do it a few times in the evening" is the real trigger here. How many times exactly? The more you try to quantify this, the better the case for the law gets.
> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation. Then you'd still need legislation for the compensation, or it ain't happening. > Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. Not allowed to require someone to pick up the phone != not allowed to call them. And I think some general sense still applies, the spirit of the law, if you will. If it happens rarely, is only about important stuff, is not taken for granted (!), I think most people wouldn't mind. If you treat a worker well and appreciate them doing something they didn't have to do, they will notice. And if they're a jerk causing grief for the company over technicalities, just because they can, you will notice, and the sooner the better. But let's say no, you can't even look at them once they're off the clock, much less ask them anything. Then the person who fucked up the handover will never do whatever mistake lead to that again. If it was an unavoidable thing, something that just happens every now and then, a cosmic ray that flipped a bit -- why expect to be able to externalize those costs to the unpaid worker? It's part of the business, whatever that business is. > eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers. Funny how it's never the third yacht for the CEO who cannot even not look goofy on one that does that, but grandma not being called from one of her 3 jobs at 2am, that will absolutely drive costs through the roof! Kidding aside though, you opened with > my friends would de-prioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well? But by the end of your comment, this is a problem that raises prices for everyone? Huh? Am I missing something? And hey, it also slightly raises salaries and lowers blood pressure for everyone. It means that when a company does something for me, I know someone wasn't mistreated to make it happen. That's just a cool thing I want as much of in my life as possible.
It may only seem like a small ask for you to tell an EA to do something afterhours but it's a significant amount of work on their end and it restricts the kind of activities they can do because you have effectively made them on call 24/7. You're basically the reason these rules are being proposed.
This seems mostly good for restaurants, some concerns I had from the title seem to be handled reasonably. It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though? Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?
It only bans uncontracted oncall. If your job description includes on call responsibilities (and compensates for them appropriately), it doesn’t appear that would be a problem?
This seems to be the crux, I couldn’t find a place where the bill explicitly says, so AIUI the rule making could fall either way. Are you “compensated for being oncall” if your contract says you may do some unspecified amount of oncall, and your pay doesn’t change if you do or don’t? You could imagine a judge / regulator deciding either way right?
Making companies spell this out explicitly in their contracts seems like a reasonable improvement to me
If you make over $130k then you make enough that you can be worked 24/7 without violating a $15 minimum wage + 1.5x over 40 hours per week.
I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs? I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day. In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes). This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.
When I worked there I spent a lot of time talking teams out of a 5min commitment. It’s really crazy.
When I quit Amazon and went to work at Google I had my mind blown by actually getting compensated to be on-call outside work hours. My coworkers shook their heads and told me I wasn't the first.
> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs? It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided. I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company. More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.
It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc. Usually about covering shifts.
Yeah, it’s basically cheap operators pushing problems down. My wife was in this business, and worked for a company that gave them full control. Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business. Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.
I'm SRE/Platform, I got paged out last night because Devs apparently can't properly crash applications. Sure, I can move hours as well but my partner doesn't care that I get off at 3 on this Friday instead of 5, she has to work till 5 and my page out interrupted our outing to the movies. Not everyone life is ultra flexible.
Same here. Applications developers and QA often can't really do their jobs, so I get roped in on every problem it seems. Plans to go out with my family on my birthday? Canceled. Plans to go kayaking with my wife on Saturday? Canceled. At this point, I am extremely tempted to leave my job, sell my house, buy some land in Wyoming or something, and just be content to be poor.
I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change? I've been fortunate to have a very limited amount of on-call events. At one place for 3.5 years there was 1 event. In another place there's been 2 in the last 9 months but on the bright side these events are taken seriously in the sense that dev time is immediately prioritized to hopefully prevent them from happening in the future. All code being written gets reviewed by someone and there's an expectation tests are included. Of course that doesn't prevent all bugs, but there's an attempt at quality control by the teams producing the code. I think part of this role (SRE / platform / DevOps / whatever you want to classify this as) is technical implementation but also coming up with systems and workflows to reduce downtime and risk when performing deployments. Not all management is open to change but IMO it should be brought up and taken seriously. There are companies out there who care about both providing value to customers while also keeping team morale high.
>I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change? IME, very few companies care they are screwing up their employees' lives. It's why these laws are good since it puts financial cost on them and gives their employees cover.
You are lucky in that you don’t have the type of employer who needs to be reined in via the law. There are some true scumbags out there.
Maybe I just have abnormal leverage but I've never had after hours coms be an issue. I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
This is a pretty self-selecting group, so I'm not surprised that most people reading this don't have a problem with after-hours coms. If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage. It's irritating.
> If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage. It's irritating. I vaguely remember a few years ago there was some news pushing new scheduling software that was supposed to help make schedules more predictable, and how it wasn't working to full potential because store managers wouldn't trust it. But I don't think the bill in question here would actually do anything to affect that issue?
[deleted]
Telling people they should get a better job implies that there is work where YOU think the workers deserve to be taken advantage of. Why IDK, guessing you hate people fighting for better quality of life through democratic norms. People rightfully hating tech workers nowadays makes so much sense.
[deleted]
> Maybe I just have abnormal leverage It could also be a personality thing or a worldview thing. Some people just have a hard time saying "no" in general, or are constantly looking for reasons to jump at shadows. Or there's people teaching that the world runs on class warfare and anyone with any amount of power is always looking for an excuse to abuse that power.
You probably have been just lucky with your bosses? Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
Your fortunate. If you’re adjacent to operations or power, after hours comms is a common experience.
[deleted]
This is a stupid rebuttal. Society is allowed to improve the life work workers while working. Just because you want people to personally suffer doesn't make it right. This is some old school puritan classism right here.
“ because you want people to personally suffer” I never said I want people to suffer. I think your position is stupid because it will cause suffering through layoffs. Very rarely has government intervention worked recently. But I guess you think these workers are stupid too and can’t take care of themselves. Just get off their backs, I promise you they can handle without your performative outrage. “ Society is allowed to improve the life work workers while working” This is not society doing anything. This is literally a politician that is advocating for government intervention in the economy.
Not always. I found myself in a job with golden handcuffs that made it difficult to leave, which went from the best job of my life to a nightmare on earth when a key leader passed away and replaced by someone whose sociopathy was one of his better attributes. His insane pace put my boss in the hospital from the stress.
[deleted]
Loads of jobs where this is expected: sales, education, hospitality, definitely the entertainment industry, etc.
As an employer (in the US) I have always had the impression that I'd risk being on the hook for overtime or some other form of additional compensation if I routinely engaged in communication with employees out of hours, so unless the place was on fire I never did. As an "employee" (contractor) I managed my own hours and adopted a pragmatic approach: if the client was paying $$$ I'd respond if it didn't interfere with my personal life, unless they were being dickish about it, in which case I'd bring it up as an issue and if necessary drop the client.
Direct link to the bill: https://legislature.mi.gov/Bills/Bill?ObjectName=2026-SB-094...
In America the definition of at will employment is so broad that employee exploitation is not covered. Technically you sign you will work at least 40 hours per week. So 120 hours is fine by the law. And if you die at work, hey it was your choice. Now on the opposite side, I also understand that there can be a handful of cases in a year where you really need to work outside the work hours, law should not be making businesses so inflexible that they are doomed to fail.
I suppose if the position requires it, like being on call, companies will just avoid Michigan workers and either out source, or hire remotely in another state. I'm originally from Michigan and have worked at lots of different jobs. I rarely ever was required to respond after hours, and if I did, it was part of my job (and explained to me in detail when I accepted the position). Does this apply to Doctors and Nurses?
I've worked for more than one small company that has an unstated policy to not hire employees who live in CA or NY. It sounds like MI might wind up on that list. I know of certain employees who reside in that state right now who are pulling ridiculous hours just to keep the business alive. None of them were forced into it or are otherwise unhappy with the circumstances they find themselves in. I've had many opportunities to re-enter the W2 labor pool and decided to stay out in the high seas. Many moons ago, when I signed up to work at Samsung Austin Semiconductor they told me I might be responsible for odd hours. I agreed to this and had a pager strapped to my body until the day I quit the job 3 years later. No one seems to get weird about a doctor-style pager ripping employees out of slumber at 2am. The only time I got a break from the pager is when I was on a 777 on my way to South Korea. Then I got a new kind of pager when I arrived. Somehow teams messages and outlook are super evil by comparison to this.
That means tech companies won't hire engineers in Michigan if they are required to be oncall, as many such engineers rotate their oncall schedules?
Getting a separate phone and phone number for work has been one of the biggest quality of life improvements for my work life balance. It's a small change in the macro, but doing this enabled me to (a) choose the device I want, (b) keep work stuff off of my personal phone, and, most importantly, (c) COMPLETELY disconnect from work when the day is done. This became necessary after COVID induced WFH forced work into the home and expectations around being "on" all of the time became more pervasive. That said, "Work Profile" is one of Android's best features, and I'd love for iOS to have something equivalent. It's not as good as a physical separation, but it's the next best thing.
A friend with an iPhone runs his a couple businesses with the Quo app (nee OpenPhone) which allows him to manage calls/sms for multiple business numbers from his personal phone while allowing him to automatically disable ringing after 5pm when he leaves the office to be a family man. My problem is that my customers prefer to reach me over iMessage, and porting my number to any "business phone in an app" means I'd be downgrading to unreliable SMS in a green bubble. So if I want to separate work/personal use, I'd need to carry a second iPhone.
> But in general, should this bill become law in Michigan, an employer could not require an employee to access or respond to work-related matters outside of their assigned hours... Violations could be reported to the state's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with fines to the company and/or overtime pay to the employee among the possible results. It will be too easy for employers to say to the DOL the employee was not actually required to respond to the work-related matter when they told the employee they are expected to. Laws like these don't solve problems (bargaining power disparity caused by a variety of factors), they solve symptoms. It may not have a significant effect.
How would this interact with existing rules around exempt / non-exempt (roughly, salaried vs hourly) employees? I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
It doesn't. As drafted it applies to exempt employees. (It's just a proposed bill; it's unlikely to happen and if it picked up any steam presumably it would be drafted more carefully.)
While I don't disagree with the intent, the reality is that workers are already at a significant disadvantage and many don't feel they have the leverage to be more firm about boundaries (with most of them feeling this way being correct about their lack of leverage). Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
While I understand how you can see it this way, laws like this have worked in many other places (yes some of those were places where employers had fewer options to move interstate, but that’s a costly thing to do for employers) It does actually work - think of it like a speed limit. If everyone is forced to go at a certain maximum speed (ie. the same max no. of contact hours per week per employee) then it’s not a (relative) loss if a business can’t operate at “full capacity” for more hours than its competitors.
I won't say that laws like this can't have any impact, but it's a global marketplace and change is constant. Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc. Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines. Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible". It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
Companies that desire on call need to be willing to pay an hourly rate for 24 hours of possible labor.
At least an ongoing retainer fee, plus paying for time spent dealing with comms.
Lots of in office people aren't doing work 100% of the time, they still get paid because they could be asked to do something. Same goes for on call, just with a flipped percentage. Further for non fixed work schedules any shifts that aren't scheduled two weeks in advance should be paid overtime.
Why is the onus on workers to make sure they are working 100.00% of the time? It's not their company, they aren't management. If you want them to cosplay as managers maybe pay them as such rather than trying to pit them amongst each other.
[deleted]
i can't figure out what some of the commentary here is borne from. "you're not working 100% of the time so it's ok if they ask you to work outside of normal hours" is sadistic.
It kind of baffles me that this needs to be a bill. I guess I'm lucky that I've never worked for a company that required me to be constantly online. (I work remotely for a US company, work European working hours, and nobody requires me to be online outside of them.)
I've worked at companies that don't outright require it, but they utilize a few workaholic employees to set an expectation sane people can't live up to. It creates a stressful environment where expectations are unclear. Combine that with the current job market and you effectively hold your employees hostage.
Ultimately companies don't exist for the employees they exist to deliver something to the customers that rely on you. Stress and uncertainty are part of work and life. Why should that come before the people you're serving?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
You are lucky. This bill is for the unlucky, because luck is not a strategy as it relates to labor rights and protections.
Yeah, now I see that my message came out a bit differently than I wanted it to. What I wanted to say is that it sucks this needs to be a law instead of just being common sense.
Absolutely sucks, but it’s where we’re at, so it must be done. If your policy isn’t law, it doesn’t exist except as a suggestion. Personally, I was very lucky. I recognize it was almost all luck. Born at the right place to the right people. Opportunities I was lucky to have because of that. Winning when gambling on relationships, professional work, and in the capital markets. I advocate for unlucky people whenever possible, because humans who did not choose to be here should not suffer due to their poor luck. “We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” —- Maurice Allais
I'm fine if they want to give me extra work when I'm not on the job. I round up to the hour, so choose your after-hours emails wisely.