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.
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.
If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly employee. Not a salary one. You might be called a salary employee. But no, you’re working as an hourly employee.
If companies expect you to be on call, that’s great. Pay an on call hourly rate. Problem solved. But you can’t just take a salary employee, treat them like they work at McDonald’s and then pay a base bi weekly salary. That’s not okay IMO.
It was ALWAYS a way to get massive unpaid overtime extracted upon threat of firing. And overtime for workers was inexcusable, no matter what. Got a rush? Too fucking bad, clock out.
These days professionally, I agreed to 40h/week. That's what they get. If there's a real outage or un-manufactured crisis, then I'll stick around. But its comp time for the week.
I don't work for free for capitalists. If they want more labor, they can pay for more.
What's your opinion on [cuck licensing](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708655)?
I'm staunchly for AGPL3, and harsh and strong enforcement actions against violators. You know, what the companies would do to us. Tit for tat.
Which is basically the situation you get from [A]GPL. You still have the option to offer a different license in exchange for money.
Stops tivo-ization. And stops app-ification (making a GPL3 into a webapp and significant changes, but not sharing as well).
But most of the FLOSS orgs (FSF, etc) don't want blood from violator companies. Instead they just want mealy-mouth halfassed responses that amount to 'open the source'.
I remember what happened to copyright violators who copied Metallica and Britnry Spears back in the early 2000's. Fucking kids got hit with $4000 settlements or $135000 lawsuits.
That's the type of vigor and destructiveness I want FLOSS orgs to go after for-profit copyright violators.
To your point about government needing to backstop working conditions, the minimum wage in Indiana is 7 dollars an hour, and yet I can get a job paying 18 dollars an hour at Taco Bell. Why do you imagine that to be the case if employers have so much bargaining power?
There is something I call the restaurant quality economy measure, a tracking method of how the economy is doing. If you go into a place like Taco Bell, or some otherwise middling restaurant and the service is really bad, and take this as a trend over a lot of eateries then is very likely you live in good economic times. Now switch that, if the average crappy place you go into has really good service then that's a good sign things have gone wrong.
Quality workers have moved down the economic ladder of employment. These people would gladly be doing something that paid more and had more prestige, but that employment doesn't exist.
What does that have to do with your statement. It's when the economy goes really bad employees realize they are in the position of power. It's this pretty much this way right now in most computing related employment, most companies have tightened down and invested more in AI than people. This means your workers will put up with a lot more bullshit in order to not be fired. And when the economy is doing bad all over, that's when the employers break out the abusive bullshit because they can? Are you going to go get a different job?
Be glad the law exists then.
So no, to hell with that paternalism.
I got a perfect score on the SAT reading comprehension section. Thanks for that valuation contribution to the discussion.
> If I am paid on salary, I would rather just be trusted to meet deliverable dates than have to worry about clocking in. Why does this government need to butt in?
This legislation...does not affect you then. All it's saying is that the employer cannot require you to respond to something on 9pm on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday unless you are paid for it. You are still free to do so, it's just that your employer can't fire you if you don't. This seems sort of reasonable to me.
So, why would they do something that works against them? Think about it. Do you go out of your way to advocate against yourself? No, right? So why would you expect them to do that? It’s just not a reasonable expectation.
Now, they might still do it anyway. Great, but you can’t expect that. So, we need to curb the incentives to get the desired behavior.
It’s just the dynamics of human behavior. Companies aren’t some magical beast - they, too, fact the push and pull of human behavior and incentives.
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.
Why are you trying to deny people the representation they deserve and prevent the government from doing something people might want? Seems like some ideologically-based bullshit to me.
Again I ask why you seek to deny others their rights?
While in theory the market punishes bad employers by making people not want to work for them, the reality is that for all but the most in-demand individuals, the power asymmetry between an individual and their employer is such that some level of government regulation is probably needed to maintain reasonable working conditions. You could certainly argue whether regulating this particular thing is a good idea or not of course.
For the same reason anything is a government issue, i.e. that we regulate acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as a society, and periodically adjust what we find acceptable?
If your employer starts dumping large amounts of trash on your property tomorrow and says "oh that's just part of our relationship with you", I bet you'll want to get the government involved real quick because you never agreed to this.
> But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so.
That's exactly what this legislation is doing. All it's saying is, if you want off-hours work, make it explicit rather than implicit. If you fire people by expecting firefighting when it's not specified in the contract, you will break the law.
Most people just want to pretend everything is fine. They sleep better at night.
Conversely, I've seen the latest heat wave in France to try to justify global warming all over HN comments, when the reality is that this is temperature and not climate.
"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."
If someone that worked for me is unwilling to help out in these situations occasionally, I wouldn't make them do anything (and follow the law). I also wouldn't promote them.
Many higher level positions require a certain level of responsibility, and this would just show me that the person can't handle it.
I do agree though. If this law were in Michigan and I had a company here, any job that required after hours communication would be outsourced to another state or country.