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#hours#don#more#phone#already#call#where#someone#need#laws
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Discussion (56 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.
My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I used to get called a lot, when my boss also ran the critical incident team. These days, I don’t get called much, the there is always a looming threat. I miss the days when being done with work meant that I was actually done with work.
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.
This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.
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/...
....what contract? There's no contract in most cases and contracts that exist very rarely define hours. I've never encountered one that did.
> seem to require any particular working hours
This isn't about enforcing hours, it's about communication during hours you're not being paid for.
are you saying that unfair terms are a workers own fault for signing? individual workers cant really negotiate employment contract below executive level and staying unemployed is not an option in todays economy. you need unions or laws to make sure everything is fair.
Some examples:
* Management pressuring someone to forge tax documents, and firing said employee when they refused. They even provided a written statement stating this as the reason.
* Someone getting fired for refusing to use grant funding outside of its designated purpose.
* A government employee was accused of corruption and was asked to step down quietly. The city wanted this employee's replacement to take money from one part of the budget for a hush-money payout, while keeping this secret from the city council.
* Someone taking maternity leave, then having her role eliminated. She was given the opportunity to apply for a new job when she returned from mat leave.
* Someone getting laid off while on mat leave. No option for another role.
On paper, all of this was highly illegal, and any employer operating in good faith should have been able to work out a solution when confronted. All of them dug in their heels and refused to consider that they were wrong. Followup generally looked like this:
* Employee escalates within the organization. This becomes a negotiation, where the org decides how much leverage they have. Note that the org might not read the law carefully or even at all. If it's gotten to this point, they've often already decided they can get away with it.
* Depending on the circumstances, reporting to some government agency may happen. There may or may not be an agency that can help. Even if there is, don't expect to become a priority or have significant resources devoted to you.
* More negotiation. The org may have lawyers who are already on salary, or at least an HR department that's ready to step in. You likely do not, and need to track down and pay for your own attorney.
* After a lot negotiation, there's some kind of settlement. If this has to go to a lawsuit, good luck paying for those additional costs and managing everything. Meanwhile, you need to find a new job. For the people you're negotiating against, it's just another day at the office and they have all the time in the world.
Having multiple statutes to establish legal claims can be redundant and annoying. It can also reduce ambiguity when negotiating with an employer who is unwilling or unable to respect their liability. Which ends up being more important will be influenced by the details of the laws and the circumstances of each situation.
This doesn't obviate your point, which I agree is important. It's dumb and sad that this is where we are.
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