Always on? The right to disconnect
By Tim Thorlby
5 mins
In this blog, I explore what’s prompting the push for a new ‘right to disconnect’. I also take the long view on working hours and work-life balance and ask whether ancient ideas of ‘sabbaths’ have any relevance to the 21st Century.
1 – The right to disconnect?
An intriguing new policy proposal was aired recently by the Labour Party – ‘the right to disconnect’ – as part of their proposed ‘New Deal for Working People’[1].
The proposal is that workers would be formally protected from being contacted by their employers outside of their regular working hours. The aim is to ensure that workers are not ‘always on’ from a work point of view and can take time off, protecting their wellbeing.
A similar ‘right to switch off’ has already been legislated for in some other European countries – for example, in France in 2017 and in Portugal in 2022.
The aim is to ensure that workers are able to have a decent work-life balance, with some boundaries between the two ensuring that work does not always dominate. It matters because an ‘always on’ approach to work by employers can lead to workers working longer than they want to, or undertaking unpaid overtime and can also undermine physical and mental health if they do not have breaks or time off. In other words, it can lead to both exploitation and ill health.
It has been suggested that our growing technological connectivity through mobile phones and the internet, together with the rise of remote working in recent years, has exacerbated this problem and made it harder for us to stop working. Some jobs also now come with built-in digital surveillance – your employer can see when you are working and hitting targets (or not).
What are we to make of this idea? Is it a good idea? What would it achieve? Is it even possible?
2 – A bit of context
Let’s start with some context.
Firstly, the long view.
Economist John Maynard Keynes predicted back in the 1930s that our working week ought to get shorter over time as productivity rises, and nearly a century later, he was broadly right. Today the average worker in the UK does indeed work many fewer hours than they did for much of the 20th Century.
However, progress in reducing average working hours in the UK came to a juddering halt at the turn of the Millenium[2] - nearly a generation ago. This is mainly because of deep-seated processes within our economy – its rentierisation (see a previous blog) and also a marked slowing in national productivity since the financial crash in 2008.
Secondly, we must recognise that we are not all in the same boat. The hours that we work, and the nature of our work, varies greatly across the UK workforce. Some of us have a high degree of control over our work and when and how we do it and will therefore consider new protections as wholly unnecessary. Others are in a much more precarious position and have much less control. It is really this latter group which the ‘right to disconnect’ is aimed at.
Thirdly, low rates of pay and low levels of income are key drivers for the long hours of many workers. If you are only earning the Minimum Wage (or less), you will have to work longer than most in order to earn a living; low pay therefore undermines work-life balance all by itself.
3 – Exploring the issues
So, what are the issues being addressed by this new policy proposal, the ‘right to disconnect’? Why do some workers need to have their work-life balance further codified and protected by law?
There are, of course, a number of legal protections already in place to support workers in securing a decent work-life balance:
The 48 hour working time directive limits the working week (taken as an average over several months) for most people, although there are opt-outs for some jobs
There are rules on minimum rest periods between working days (minimum 11 hours) and the right to break times during shifts
There are statutory holidays
Employment contracts must state, in writing, what working hours are involved, and when and where
So, overall, isn’t this enough?
What is driving the push for a new ‘right to disconnect’ is that working from home and the use of digital technology is contributing to an increasing lack of clarity about when someone is ‘at work’ or not. So, the 48 hour working time directive is great, but if it’s not clear when this 48 hours starts and finishes, then it rather loses its bite.
At the core of the concern are those jobs which do not have clearly defined ‘shifts’ or boundaried hours and where unscrupulous, or disorganised (or just careless?) employers can continue to make demands of workers around the clock. The problem can also arise where managers are working flexible hours themselves and emailing at weekends and in evenings, requiring responses out of normal hours, or raising the expectation of such responses, possibly unintentionally.
The aim of new rules would be to ensure that workers can benefit from remote and flexible working without it undermining their work-life balance or wellbeing. It would be a new tool to clarify and manage ‘digital boundaries’. The proposals have been developed by Prospect[3] a union with members across numerous professions – mainly white collar, not blue collar.
A number of other European countries have already brought in a ‘right to disconnect’. There are clearly operational difficulties to be addressed; blanket bans on communication between certain hours are impractical as there may be good reasons why employers need to get in touch out of hours, in an emergency for example, or if unforeseen circumstances arise. Similarly, a degree of flexibility can often be in the worker’s own interest, so some leeway and judgement is clearly required to make any such policy work well.
4 – Don’t blame it on the tech
I would like to share three reflections on this proposal:
Worst case scenario – there clearly are, sadly, some employers whose behaviour needs to be regulated, as they intentionally use the fuzzy boundaries of remote working to extract more (unpaid) work than they are entitled to. It is not difficult to see how a clear policy of ‘disconnection’ would help to manage this. By defining days and times when no contact is expected, it affirms the idea that work has boundaries. For some workers this proposal could be rather important.
Culture eats rules for breakfast – whilst the rise of digital technology is a key driver for longer working hours for some, and even exploitation, and it has increased the scope for flexible working I’m not sure we can just blame the technology. There have always been exploitative managers and companies and extending ‘rights’ is unlikely to be sufficient; after all, there is nothing to stop a manager increasing your sales targets before he logs off or browbeating you to work longer hours with threats of aggressive performance management. He will be sleeping soundly in the middle of the night whilst you continue working in an effort to preserve your job.
Whatever ‘rights’ are enacted, each company and manager still has full responsibility for their workers’ wellbeing and so their attitude, approach and working culture will remain central to how each worker experiences their job. The ‘right to disconnect’ is really addressing a symptom, not the underlying cause, of exploitation; it may be a helpful new tool but we will still, in some cases, need better companies too. The culture of our market place and the companies within it is a core issue for us.
Workers have responsibility too – We all have responsibility for our own actions and perhaps too many of us have been rather slow to put our own work boundaries in place. We may only know that the boss has emailed us late on Friday night because…..well, we were checking our emails, and perhaps should not have bothered? Our digital age requires new habits, and that is a shared responsibility which sits with all of us.
5 – Revisiting ancient boundaries
Arguments about how to draw boundaries around work are not new; this is ancient territory.
The Old Testament ‘sabbath’ was the one day each week when no-one was supposed to work – neither manager nor worker, not even the your donkey. It was intended as a day of rest, and collective rest at that; it also provided a breathing space for the ‘land’ and it gave the opportunity for collective worship too. It was deemed sufficiently important to Israel’s national identity that it even made its way into the Ten Commandments. Putting clear boundaries around work was no afterthought, it was part of the national Constitution.
More recently, I remember the parliamentary battles in the 1980s and 1990s over the UK’s Sunday Trading Laws. For centuries, Sundays were a shared day off for many families and communities and most businesses would close. It was far from perfect for sure, but it provided time off for millions of people each week. In 1994 those laws were relaxed and, together with the ongoing decline in church-going, the concept of Sunday as a ‘shared day of rest’ has been increasingly lost for many people in the UK.
It is worth remembering that one of the main backers of the original ‘Keep Sunday Special Campaign’ was USDAW, the shop workers’ union. Even today, with their half a million members, they continue to run this campaign in order to protect the work-life balance of shop workers as well as the viability of many small shops which cannot compete with the supermarkets in seven day trading. As recently as 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson attempted to abolish the remaining Sunday Trading laws, although this was rapidly dropped after a backbench Tory revolt.
The challenge of managing remote/digital working and Sunday trading are not the same, but they do have a lot in common:
A recognition that life is about more than just working and so boundaries need to be drawn around work
The need to protect workers from unbridled market forces which can undermine individual wellbeing (and a recognition that individuals rarely have the power to do this entirely for themselves, it requires collective agreement)
The social value to family life (or social life) when there is shared time off for families and communities
Free at last?
We are currently in the paradoxical situation where two different ‘freedoms’ are actually undermining each other.
As society has grown wealthier and the working week has contracted, we have the potential to earn a decent income without working all day and night. There is even growing momentum now for a ‘four day week’, led by Autonomy and others. We are increasingly financially free to spend less time at work than most of our ancestors.
At the same time, however, our digital technologies and flexible working regimes are giving us the freedom to increasingly work where and whenever we want, and for many people the effect of this has, ironically, been to increase the impact of work upon our lives, not lessen it. There is great flexibility and potential in not being tied to a rigid 9 to 5 schedule, but that freedom can become oppressive, if it means that work never ends. Flexibility is not an advantage if it means that we lose control of our working hours and can never switch off.
As with all freedoms, there is a need to intentionally manage the possibilities so that they produce benefits rather than just chaos.
5 – A 21st Century sabbath for a secular society?
It turns out that our largely secular society still needs its sabbath. We have to be intentional about time off work, or it won’t happen.
It would deeply ironic if the rise of digital technology, with all of its power and flexibility, left us working longer hours and even more stressed out than before.
We may not be going back to a traditional ‘Sundays off’ but we clearly need a collective agreement on how we let each other stop work and rest, for our health and wellbeing.
Interestingly, a 2020 opinion poll suggested fairly strong support for Sunday continuing to be the UK’s national day of rest each week, with c.60% still supporting the idea that Sunday is a day of rest and socialising with limited shop opening hours[4].
As noted above, the UK already has quite a number of perfectly good employment protections – the 48 hour working time directive, rules on minimum rest periods and break times, etc.
I think there may be two things missing though:
Enforcement of rights – too many workers don’t know their existing rights and few resources are attached to enforcing those rights. I think greater public investment in enforcement would greatly enhance health and wellbeing across the UK, putting more unscrupulous employers on notice to ‘up their game’. It would help to strengthen healthier corporate cultures and a happier market place.
Right to Rest – I would be tempted to broaden out the ‘right to disconnect’ to a national ‘right to rest’? Employment contracts are already supposed to include a written statement of ‘regular hours’. Making it clear that workers should not normally be expected to work outside of these is great, but why not also ensure that every employment contract also includes at least one clear day each week (it could be any day) when no work can be required and no contact expected?
In this digital age, as possibilities abound, can we find the social imagination to manage our freedoms so that they actually deliver health and well-being for all?
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. If you found it interesting, you can sign up for free alerts for future blogs.
Notes
[1] Guardian news article, 12th May 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/may/12/labour-planning-right-to-switch-off-for-workers-if-it-wins-general-elections
[2] For the (very) long view on working hours, you can check out the data here: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
[3] You can read their guide to the policy proposal here: https://prospect.org.uk/news/right-to-disconnect
[4] National opinion polls by Populus in 2015 and 2020, see: https://www.keepsundayspecial.org.uk/evidence/communities