Australian ‘right to disconnect’ laws end after-hours work texts

They are the hardest missives to ignore — the late-night texts and emails from an impatient boss.
Now Australians have the legal right to ignore workplace intrusions into home life following the passing of new “right to disconnect” laws.
Under the new laws, employees will in most instances no longer face penalties or the possibility of losing their jobs for refusing to respond to contact from their employers outside working hours.
The laws will at first apply to workplaces with 15 or more employees. Those working at smaller businesses will not gain the same protections until mid-2025.
Britain’s Labour government confirmed three days ago that it would introduce right to disconnect laws similar to those Australia has brought in.
Meeting the Labour Party’s “right to switch off” campaign pledge, the laws are aimed at empowering workers to disconnect from their jobs outside regular hours, including the right to refuse to take on extra work at the weekends.
The plan received renewed backing from Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, last week. His deputy spokesman said: “This is about ensuring people have some time to rest.”
Advocates for the laws in Australia argued that they would allow employees to regain more control over their outside work activities — a space, they claimed, employers have steadily invaded since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many employees worked from home.
Gabrielle Golding, a workplace law academic at Adelaide Law School, said the pandemic and periods of enforced working from home had promoted growth in what she calls “availability creep”.
“During that time when we were, by and large, forced to work from home, we were kind of training ourselves to be constantly available within our homes and elsewhere outside of the workplace,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
What she described as “cheap and easy” access to digital connectivity meant being available had become a default setting for many employees.
Right to disconnect laws should give Australian workers an option to reset the intrusion of work into their non-working hours, she said.
Australians worked on average more than 280 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, according to a survey conducted by the Australia Institute. The study found the average worker was losing out on A$11,055 (£5600) a year, or $425 a fortnight, in unpaid overtime.
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By adopting the new laws, Australia joins more than 20 nations, mostly in Europe and Latin America, which have similar laws.
France first introduced such rules in 2017 and a year later fined pest control firm Rentokil Initial €60,000 euros for requiring an employee to always have his phone on.
In cases of emergency, the new laws permit employers to contact their workers out of hours, but an employees may refuse to respond where they consider reasonable to do so.
Determining whether a refusal is reasonable will be up to Australia’s workplace regulator, the Fair Work Commission (FWC), which must take into account an employee’s role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.
The FWC has powers to issue cease and desist orders to employers and fines companies that breach the new laws.
However, the Australian Industry Group, Australia’s major employers’ body, claims that ambiguity surrounding the new rules would create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs would become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added.
“The laws came literally and figuratively out of left field, were introduced with minimal consultation about their practical effect and have left little time for employers to prepare,” the group said on Thursday.