A right-to-disconnect law, adopted in February in Australia, came into effect on Monday for medium and large businesses. “Today is a historic day for workers,” said Michele O’Neil, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Australians will be able to “spend quality time with their loved ones without the stress of having to constantly respond to unreasonable work calls and messages,” she added.
Under the new law, employees can now “refuse to monitor, read, or respond” to requests from their employers outside of their working hours, unless such delay is “reasonable.”
The Australian Industry Group, an employers’ organisation, has expressed its reservations, calling “right to disconnect laws” “rushed, ill-considered and deeply confusing”. “Employers and employees will no longer know whether they can accept or make an out-of-hours call to offer overtime,” it continued.
“Get closer to his family”
“We encourage workers to educate themselves about the right to disconnect and take a common-sense approach to enforcing it in their workplace,” said Anna Booth of the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), an independent Australian agency responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulating workplace relations. Judging what is reasonable “depends on the circumstances,” the FWO said in a statement. Decisive factors can include, among other things, the reason for the contact or the nature of the employee’s position.
“We want to make sure that because people are not paid 24 hours a day, they don’t have to work 24 hours a day,” said Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose reform was put in place by his government, on public television. “It’s also a question of mental health, frankly, that people can switch off from their work and be closer to their families and their lives,” he also said.
Small businesses with fewer than 15 employees have been granted additional time and will be required to apply this law from 26 August 2025. The “right to disconnect” came into force in France in 2017, Spain in 2018 and in Belgium in 2022.
Source: BFM TV
