Weekend Work Emails Are Now Illegal In France; Huffington Post, 5/25/16

Dominique Mosbergen, Huffington Post; Weekend Work Emails Are Now Illegal In France:

"Checking your work email on a weekend or a holiday? In France, where employees have been granted “the right to disconnect,” that’s now against the law.

Buried inside a recently enacted — and hotly contested — French labor reform bill is an amendment banning companies of 50 or more employees from sending emails after typical work hours. “The right to disconnect” amendment, as it’s so called, is aimed at minimizing the negative impacts of being excessively plugged in...

Under the new law, companies are mandated to negotiate formal policies to limit the spillover of work, specifically as it’s related to “digital technology,” into the private lives of employees. This, according to the BBC, will involve companies establishing “charters of good conduct” specifying hours, typically in the evenings and weekends, when employees aren’t supposed to send or receive email.

“The development of information and communication technologies, if badly managed or regulated, can have an impact on the health of workers,” Article 25 of the bill reads. “Among them, the burden of work and the informational overburden, the blurring of the borders between private life and professional life, are risks associated with the usage of digital technology.”

Some have lauded this clause as a win in the battle against over-connectedness."