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.
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.
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.
"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".
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Take for example a university. Many of them seem to use Duo[1], which is not something you can replace with Google Authenticator or other TOTP app. They require it for students as well as faculty and staff. Is it reasonable for them to have to provide a device to all those people, forcing them to carry two devices around, and then also deal with replacing lost or broken devices? The cost of this would simply be added to the technology fee that students have to pay, when they all already have smartphones and could use the app for no additional cost.
Seems pretty in line with a recent frontpost of "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It " [1].
There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.
>In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.
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.
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.
>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)
Only if they're using RFC 6238 TOTP, and not some weird 2fa app. It's ironic you mention authy because they have their own weird TOTP scheme, along with push notification based approval system.
Authy is also EOL since it was acquired by twilio and tossed into the do not recycle bin it seems...
But yeah, things can get messy depending on the specifics, but not installing random apps on your personal phone seems like a pretty reasonable line to make.
I only mentioned Authy cause it was my go-to for 2fa before they got acquired
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’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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You don’t have to take that job if you don’t like it. Just price the extra work in your hourly rate requirement and if the job does not meet that, then don’t apply for that job.
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.
Yes. And those are hard working people who decided that that was a good trade off and took the job (as opposed to the legislator who other than “editing” had not had a job before she took on the job of highly paid politician).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hot take: The reality is unless this becomes a ban on after hours coms (which likely isn't feasible), economic incentives will prevail. Folks that are less available, less engaged, and in less communication will be darwin'd out.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
Regardless of whether people agree with the concept or not, this seems like excessive bureaucracy. This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract and it seems like just paperwork to have more laws saying that someone's reasonable working hours are indeed their agreed reasonable working hours. It shouldn't and probably doesn't need an act to metaphorically underline a short phrase in a contract. It is just creating drag on small businesses and that sort of thing costs money. I suppose this is an opportunity to link my favourite article reminding everyone that petty business regulation pretty much just makes countries poorer [0].
It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.
I'm just going off the summary document [0], but the law doesn't seem to require any particular working hours. It just says people should stick to them once they've been agreed. That's already implied by having working hours. The whole bill basically just tells the regulator that the legislature thinks the fine for not sticking to the employment contract should be up to $500 which is probably redundant since I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts. And they shouldn't need special and specific powers to fine someone for particular employment contract violations, if they're going to have power they should have general powers.
> taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I don't see how the bill or anything I wrote have anything to do with group negotiations. People can negotiate as a group for all I care, as long as I can negotiate on my own.
> This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract
are you saying that unfair terms are a workers own fault for signing? individual workers cant really negotiate employment contract below executive level and staying unemployed is not an option in todays economy. you need unions or laws to make sure everything is fair.
You have a point, and I share your general concern with bureaucracy. However, I'd encourage you to consider how I've seen employment law situations like this play out in practice.
Some examples:
* Management pressuring someone to forge tax documents, and firing said employee when they refused. They even provided a written statement stating this as the reason.
* Someone getting fired for refusing to use grant funding outside of its designated purpose.
* A government employee was accused of corruption and was asked to step down quietly. The city wanted this employee's replacement to take money from one part of the budget for a hush-money payout, while keeping this secret from the city council.
* Someone taking maternity leave, then having her role eliminated. She was given the opportunity to apply for a new job when she returned from mat leave.
* Someone getting laid off while on mat leave. No option for another role.
On paper, all of this was highly illegal, and any employer operating in good faith should have been able to work out a solution when confronted. All of them dug in their heels and refused to consider that they were wrong. Followup generally looked like this:
* Employee escalates within the organization. This becomes a negotiation, where the org decides how much leverage they have. Note that the org might not read the law carefully or even at all. If it's gotten to this point, they've often already decided they can get away with it.
* Depending on the circumstances, reporting to some government agency may happen. There may or may not be an agency that can help. Even if there is, don't expect to become a priority or have significant resources devoted to you.
* More negotiation. The org may have lawyers who are already on salary, or at least an HR department that's ready to step in. You likely do not, and need to track down and pay for your own attorney.
* After a lot negotiation, there's some kind of settlement. If this has to go to a lawsuit, good luck paying for those additional costs and managing everything. Meanwhile, you need to find a new job. For the people you're negotiating against, it's just another day at the office and they have all the time in the world.
Having multiple statutes to establish legal claims can be redundant and annoying. It can also reduce ambiguity when negotiating with an employer who is unwilling or unable to respect their liability. Which ends up being more important will be influenced by the details of the laws and the circumstances of each situation.
This doesn't obviate your point, which I agree is important. It's dumb and sad that this is where we are.
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.
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.
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".
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).
> 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.
Assume good faith. Don’t cross examine.
Not at all.
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.
> 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, 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.
How do bills like these work for jobs where you are literally on call for outages?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Take for example a university. Many of them seem to use Duo[1], which is not something you can replace with Google Authenticator or other TOTP app. They require it for students as well as faculty and staff. Is it reasonable for them to have to provide a device to all those people, forcing them to carry two devices around, and then also deal with replacing lost or broken devices? The cost of this would simply be added to the technology fee that students have to pay, when they all already have smartphones and could use the app for no additional cost.
[1] https://duo.com/
Seems pretty in line with a recent frontpost of "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It " [1].
There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689859
I'm happy to be the "troublemaker". In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
>In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.
Dude, your characterization of me being an arch user with an ancient latop is clearly in bad faith.
Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.
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.
What about people who don’t have smartphones? Not everyone has one.
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
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.
>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)
Only if they're using RFC 6238 TOTP, and not some weird 2fa app. It's ironic you mention authy because they have their own weird TOTP scheme, along with push notification based approval system.
Authy is also EOL since it was acquired by twilio and tossed into the do not recycle bin it seems...
But yeah, things can get messy depending on the specifics, but not installing random apps on your personal phone seems like a pretty reasonable line to make.
I only mentioned Authy cause it was my go-to for 2fa before they got acquired
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.
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’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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
One thing I wonder is how will this politician work an after hours meeting with the citizens.
Will she not show up or will she tell her constituents that THEY need to do the meeting at HER working hours?
Citizens are not employees of politicians. Only the politician’s staffers are.
Arguably the politician works for us so we can decide their working hours.
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?
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.
You don’t have to take that job if you don’t like it. Just price the extra work in your hourly rate requirement and if the job does not meet that, then don’t apply for that job.
Freedom is not complicated.
> 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.
Yes. And those are hard working people who decided that that was a good trade off and took the job (as opposed to the legislator who other than “editing” had not had a job before she took on the job of highly paid politician).
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.
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.
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.
Direct link to the bill: https://legislature.mi.gov/Bills/Bill?ObjectName=2026-SB-094...
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.
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.
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.
“We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” —- Maurice Allais
it's spelled "comms" although that is still jargon and the actual headline is "contact"
Michigan is becoming poorer relative to its neighboring states. Maybe not the right time for this?
Hot take: The reality is unless this becomes a ban on after hours coms (which likely isn't feasible), economic incentives will prevail. Folks that are less available, less engaged, and in less communication will be darwin'd out.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
Regardless of whether people agree with the concept or not, this seems like excessive bureaucracy. This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract and it seems like just paperwork to have more laws saying that someone's reasonable working hours are indeed their agreed reasonable working hours. It shouldn't and probably doesn't need an act to metaphorically underline a short phrase in a contract. It is just creating drag on small businesses and that sort of thing costs money. I suppose this is an opportunity to link my favourite article reminding everyone that petty business regulation pretty much just makes countries poorer [0].
It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
a major function of the law is to mediate between groups that have unequal power
as a collective, employees out-vote employers and can obtain this kind of concession through the law but not in an individual contract negotiation
(mancur olson notwithstanding)
taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I'm just going off the summary document [0], but the law doesn't seem to require any particular working hours. It just says people should stick to them once they've been agreed. That's already implied by having working hours. The whole bill basically just tells the regulator that the legislature thinks the fine for not sticking to the employment contract should be up to $500 which is probably redundant since I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts. And they shouldn't need special and specific powers to fine someone for particular employment contract violations, if they're going to have power they should have general powers.
> taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I don't see how the bill or anything I wrote have anything to do with group negotiations. People can negotiate as a group for all I care, as long as I can negotiate on my own.
[0] https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billanalysis/...
> I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts
....what contract? There's no contract in most cases and contracts that exist very rarely define hours. I've never encountered one that did.
> seem to require any particular working hours
This isn't about enforcing hours, it's about communication during hours you're not being paid for.
> This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract
are you saying that unfair terms are a workers own fault for signing? individual workers cant really negotiate employment contract below executive level and staying unemployed is not an option in todays economy. you need unions or laws to make sure everything is fair.
You have a point, and I share your general concern with bureaucracy. However, I'd encourage you to consider how I've seen employment law situations like this play out in practice.
Some examples:
* Management pressuring someone to forge tax documents, and firing said employee when they refused. They even provided a written statement stating this as the reason.
* Someone getting fired for refusing to use grant funding outside of its designated purpose.
* A government employee was accused of corruption and was asked to step down quietly. The city wanted this employee's replacement to take money from one part of the budget for a hush-money payout, while keeping this secret from the city council.
* Someone taking maternity leave, then having her role eliminated. She was given the opportunity to apply for a new job when she returned from mat leave.
* Someone getting laid off while on mat leave. No option for another role.
On paper, all of this was highly illegal, and any employer operating in good faith should have been able to work out a solution when confronted. All of them dug in their heels and refused to consider that they were wrong. Followup generally looked like this:
* Employee escalates within the organization. This becomes a negotiation, where the org decides how much leverage they have. Note that the org might not read the law carefully or even at all. If it's gotten to this point, they've often already decided they can get away with it.
* Depending on the circumstances, reporting to some government agency may happen. There may or may not be an agency that can help. Even if there is, don't expect to become a priority or have significant resources devoted to you.
* More negotiation. The org may have lawyers who are already on salary, or at least an HR department that's ready to step in. You likely do not, and need to track down and pay for your own attorney.
* After a lot negotiation, there's some kind of settlement. If this has to go to a lawsuit, good luck paying for those additional costs and managing everything. Meanwhile, you need to find a new job. For the people you're negotiating against, it's just another day at the office and they have all the time in the world.
Having multiple statutes to establish legal claims can be redundant and annoying. It can also reduce ambiguity when negotiating with an employer who is unwilling or unable to respect their liability. Which ends up being more important will be influenced by the details of the laws and the circumstances of each situation.
This doesn't obviate your point, which I agree is important. It's dumb and sad that this is where we are.