On Legislating Leisure
Terry H. Schwadron
April 11, 2024
Here’s another sign from the front lines of the culture wars that we’re spending time arguing about legislation to achieve what seems like common sense and personal curtesy.
As with deciding on the acceptability of books in your home, on the widespread attacks on identity-related concerns, on the transition to electric cars and so many other things, from the Left and the Right, we’re losing focus on what makes sense for pushing agendas for the Law to insist on a point of view.
The current case is a proposed, presumably well-intentioned bill in the California Legislature to provide a legal “right to disconnect” from the workplace. Basically, it aims to stop the practice of over-stepping work supervisors from calling you or me well after work hours with a request that likely could have waited until the morning.
Since we’re all plugged in all the time, the note is received along with its attendant load of guilt, prompting us to reopen the laptop and get out an answer quickly to forestall perceived criticism or employer unhappiness.
If this bill from Rep. Matt Haney, a Bay Area Democrat, passes, any employer who violates a do-not-disturb practice would face a $100 fine — admittedly not a bar that would stop the practice It would require employers to establish a companywide policy on what their working hours are and how they will respect employees’ “right to disconnect.”
But this bill seems as much about the statement that we need to fight back against being ruled by our technology as about providing actual after-work mental health space.
Technology and Burnout
The cultural set-up in this debate is acknowledgement that work, which already was becoming ubiquitous became much more invasive because of the pandemic’s requirement of moving work to home for many of us. The technology made it all so easy, but the impact as illustrated in any number of research studies, is that workers feel more pressure to remain plugged in to respond at all hours.
That connection, in turn, has raised stress in a society already becoming more attuned to mental health. We should recognize this bill not simply as a political statement but a tangible way to raise awareness that we’re sliding into a world of constant connectedness.
Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian notes that academic journals abound with pieces about the negative effects of the 24/7 workplace. In 2016, a study led by a researcher at Lehigh University found that “modern workplace technologies may be hurting the very employees that those technologies were designed to help.” A 2019 article for the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law noted that “work is being done not only at home, but in transit and on vacation. The result has been loss of privacy and autonomy, causing a detrimental impact on safety and health, an attendant loss of productivity, and a lack of time for any leisure or recreational activities alone or with family and friends.”
The Pew Research Center has noted that more than half of workers respond to work messages outside of their normal hours. Thirteen other countries, including France, Australia, Portugal, and Canada, already have laws like this.
“The villain here, if there had to be one, is not the bosses but really the technology,” Representative Haney has explained. “Everybody has a smartphone, so they’re available 24/7, and that has led a lot of people to feel they can never turn off. Our laws are not updated to reflect that reality.”
Of course, the proposal has drawn opposition from businesses and the California Chamber of Commerce, which called the bill a “blanket rule” that’s a “step backward for workplace flexibility.” The business argument is that current laws already are too restrictive to fully offer the kind of work flexibility that workers are demanding and has offered the more usual response that rules are job killers.
This opposition seems more pronounced among start-up companies. Joshua March, who heads a San Francisco company, said in an op-ed that sometimes there are tight deadlines, and startups need to do whatever it takes to win, adding that employees joining such a group should expect to crash on emerging projects to move ahead.
Why a Law?
Okay, it seems time for some common sense. Employee burnout is real, though record-keeping seems sporadic. Employees who feel stressed probably work less productively. Maintaining a trained work force should be as important a goal for many businesses as meeting the latest deadline.
Jobseekers increasingly are seeking work from home and flexible hours as a prerequisite for hiring — likely among the factors that make it difficult for many firms, particularly small businesses, to find the talent they seek. To a certain extent, flexible hours might mean loose interpretation of work hours for the company as well as the employee.
Asking all companies in California, regardless of size and mission, to outline in writing all circumstances in which there might be an after-hours message might be a reach too far.
Common sense should mean that this all should be settled well outside the reach of legislation. Doesn’t this issue more rightly belong in good communications and understanding among bosses and workers.
For openers, no legislation is going to result in good business management, never mind humane management. In the countries adopting the disconnect rule, its effect has been minimal.
It’s always unclear what happens if an employee happens to be unavailable in private hours to an immediate work request. Presumably the boss, too, has stress issues, and should have as part of individual goals an assignment to ensure sensitivity to mental health issues among a reporting staff.
Having worked myself in newsrooms, the response to this kind of issue was assigning rotating shifts to have at least minimal staff by schedule through the 24-hour day.
The good news here is that this is a clean, distinct, very real culture war issue that seems to have little to do with partisan politics. Instead, it is about where work should be done and how present employees are expected to be on duty. It is about our relentless drive for economic growth even in the face of stressing the people who do the work.
We’re in a time of proposals for 32-hour work weeks, more remote work, the entry of artificial information machinery to do routine tasks. Why do we need a law to tell a supervisor to think twice about sending a work message after hours or attaching a phrase that says it need not be addressed until tomorrow.
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