Australians now have the right to disconnect from work. Will other countries follow suit?

Australian workers have won the latest battle in the war against work creep. Thanks to a law passed last month, employees now have the right to disconnect, which means their employers can’t punish them for failing to respond to messages or phone calls outside of working hours. Employees hold a bit of the power now—they can file a complaint to the Fair Work Commission, which can order their boss to stop making intrusive phone calls or demands past the end of the work day.

This latest law joins legislation from a handful of other countries working to push back against an always-online culture. In recent years, individual workers’ average output has skyrocketed at least 61 percent since 1979, while wages have stagnated. Legislating more flexibility for employees is a way to give them back some autonomy and prevent people from being taken advantage of in a world where it’s hard to calculate the cost of responding to emails and texts on the weekend. Belgium now requires employers to offer the option of a four-day workweek, and Germany is trialing something similar. Starting next month, the United Kingdom will grant workers the right to request a flexible schedule from day one of employment, and employers must provide a reason to decline the request.

“As well as clear benefits to workers, the measures are also good for British business,” the UK Department for Business and Trade said in a report about the Flexible Working Bill published last year. “Research has shown companies that embrace flexible working can attract more talent, improve staff motivation and reduce staff turnover—boosting their business’s productivity and competitiveness.”

Of course, the rise of remote work also impacts tourism. Over 60 countries now offer visas for remote workers to keep their jobs in their home country while living abroad. This can provide nomad magnet communities with a serious influx of foreign cash, and it can also help remote workers learn new language skills, make new contacts, and save money if they move somewhere with a lower cost of living.

And of course, this also comes with complicated employment questions that legislation may not yet have caught up to. When employees work from abroad because they want to, whose laws prevail, the laws where the employer is based, or the employee?

France, for example, allows employees the right to ignore requests that come in after hours. In the Netherlands, work-from-home employees can claim a tax-free allowance of 2 euros per day to cover the costs of toilet paper and coffee. In Portugal, employees have the right to turn off their work devices when they head home, and companies can be fined for violating this “right to rest.” The same set of laws also codified a right for parents to work remotely indefinitely until their children are eight years old.

Portugal seems to think these enhanced labor protections could attract more foreign remote workers, who could be enticed by living somewhere they’re not expected to be always thinking about work.

“We consider Portugal one of the best places in the world for these digital nomads and remote workers to choose to live in, we want to attract them to Portugal,” Portugal’s Minister of Labour and Social Security, Ana Mendes Godinho, said at a conference in 2021.

Not everyone is on board with these laws, though. Len Shackleton, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, wrote that the right to disconnect may lead to unintended consequences that ultimately harm workers’ mental health. Employers could put more pressure on their staff to ensure they’re getting every minute of productivity possible during the scheduled work day, for example. But as the UK considers similar legislation put forward by the Labour Party, one self-proclaimed “bad boss” wrote that he believes the threat of legal consequences is the answer to making everyone behave better—and healthier—at work.

André Spicer, a professor at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London, recently admitted that he often sends co-workers emails at 5am and on weekends, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He has tried to implement systems to avoid it, but he often fails. “Many people find it difficult to stop themselves making work-related communications outside working hours,” he wrote, in a column for The Guardian in which he all but begged for the UK government to legally prohibit him from doing so.

So far, these laws may be too new to draw conclusions about how much they’re changing work-life balance and quality of life. However, one study published by Eurofound showed that even if behavior hasn’t changed, employees feel better with these laws in place. They experience better work-life balance, less anxiety and stress, and fewer headaches.

Managers, too, stand to benefit from legislation that helps them declutter and avoid needless meetings and emails, Spicer wrote. “Clear boundaries might be tough for managers like me to get their heads around,” he said. “But perhaps a right to disconnect would force us to ensure our contracted work day was spent doing things that really matter.”

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