Australia Grants Workers the Right to Disconnect: Employees Can Now Ignore Non-Emergency Work Messages After Hours

On August 26, Australia passed a new law granting employees the right to disconnect, meaning they are not obligated to engage with work-related messages outside of working hours.

Why was this law enacted? It protects employees from being penalized for not reading or responding to messages from their employer/company outside of work hours. Therefore, any punitive action taken by an employer/company for such reasons is deemed illegal.

Dealing with company messages after hours is a common issue for many, but clearly, once off the clock or outside designated working hours, individuals have the right to their personal time.

The law stipulates that while employers/businesses or clients may contact employees after hours, it is up to the employee to decide whether to read or respond to messages, including options like ignoring or acknowledging without responding.

Effective immediately, this law applies to all workers within the national system in Australia, with a one-year grace period provided for other small and medium-sized businesses before becoming applicable to all employers/businesses after August 26 of the following year.

It's important to note that the primary purpose of the law is to protect the rights of ordinary workers. Employees earning over $175,000 per year (likely managers or higher-level executives) are not eligible for these protections. For instance, if they face penalties for not responding, this law does not protect them.

However, the law also specifies that employees can reasonably refuse to respond to messages, with legal examples illustrating what constitutes an exception. For example, if an employee is asked by a manager to respond to an "urgent" email but finds its contents not urgent, they can rightfully ignore it.

In situations where, for instance, a retail employer notices through surveillance that an employee forgot to turn off a power source, posing a potential safety risk, contacting the employee off-hours is deemed reasonable. Refusal in such circumstances is considered unreasonable, given the safety implications.

Not everyone supports this new legislation, with some business leaders arguing it increases operational costs, especially for businesses with remote or flexibly working employees and those across different time zones.

For HR managers, scheduling work hours becomes a challenge, as teams in different time zones must coordinate efficiently. However, such businesses are relatively few.

Ordinary workers overwhelmingly support the legislation, with a survey of over 800 Australians showing that 78% of respondents are more likely to work for a company that explicitly provides the right to disconnect.