DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
67% Positive
Analyzed from 1985 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#hours#don#more#phone#working#laws#already#employees#where#need
Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.
Are there statistics somewhere about what percent of people in various roles get asked but know they're safe declining, or mistakenly think they can't decline, or correctly think they'd get in trouble for declining, or don't get asked but think they have to anyway?
Laws like this often happen in the states first, if/when they catch on, it puts pressure on the federal government; often to avoid the confusion of 50 different variations on the law.
The article isn't clear how exactly this is intended to work. I think no surprise hours that aren't recognized in the terms of employment makes sense. But also I think I should be able to agree to being available if I am willing to be. Remote Michigan tech workers already have enough trouble as tech companies insist on returning to office.
I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.
I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.
Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?
Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?
I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
It could also be a personality thing or a worldview thing.
Some people just have a hard time saying "no" in general, or are constantly looking for reasons to jump at shadows.
Or there's people teaching that the world runs on class warfare and anyone with any amount of power is always looking for an excuse to abuse that power.
Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.
In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.
I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.
More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.
Usually about covering shifts.
Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business.
Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.
There are some true scumbags out there.
I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
It does actually work - think of it like a speed limit. If everyone is forced to go at a certain maximum speed (ie. the same max no. of contact hours per week per employee) then it’s not a (relative) loss if a business can’t operate at “full capacity” for more hours than its competitors.
Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.
Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.
Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".
It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
as a collective, employees out-vote employers and can obtain this kind of concession through the law but not in an individual contract negotiation
(mancur olson notwithstanding)
taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
> taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I don't see how the bill or anything I wrote have anything to do with group negotiations. People can negotiate as a group for all I care, as long as I can negotiate on my own.
[0] https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billanalysis/...
Michigan spent $1.8 billion and only created 602 jobs [1]
I have no opinion about this bill but it might create one more hurdle for companies who want open business in Michigan.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48702060
US population and working age population will continue to decline into the future due to structural demographics. As labor supply declines, it’s an ideal time to work towards improved labor rights over the next several decades.
(Deaths outnumber births in ~21 states as of this comment, and will come for all states eventually)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (citations)
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality - https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep... - January 15th, 2025