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.
I misread the headline as “the right to discontent,” which I think is also a good idea to codify, given the way people who speak out are often punished for legitimate complaints