Australian workers will now have the legal “right to disconnect” from work, as per a rule which came into effect on Monday. This means they can now ignore their bosses’ emails, phone calls, and texts outside of work hours.
It entitles employees to ignore out-of-hours attempts by employers to contact them unless this refusal is deemed to become “unreasonable.”
“We want to make sure that just as people don’t get paid 24 hours a day, they don’t have to work for 24 hours a day. It’s a mental health issue, frankly, as well, for people to be able to disconnect from their work and connect with their family and their life,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in an interview with national broadcaster ABC.
That’s not really practical. For a lot of on-call roles, you need the experience of working on the equipment daily to know how to fix it.
Even if you alternated e.g. a week of on-call then a week of normal shifts, you end up reducing the amount of time you have that is completely non-work.
Firemen are absolutely not doing nothing until called out. There’s training, maintenance, cleaning, post-incident paperwork, and probably other duties.
alternating oncall is the norm and im not saying exactly like firemen. Im saying if your oncall you should not have to clock in like normal because they want you jumping out of bed at 3am if things are bad.