If you want the easy life outside of work, then it looks as though France is the country you should go and live in. Workers there already enjoy a 35-hour week, but now it’s against the law to read work email outside of working hours. A new labor agreement was signed last week in France which forbids workers from reading and acting on email after 6pm every night.
The labour agreement in means that employees must ignore their bosses’ work emails once they are out of the office and relaxing at home – even on their smartphones.
Well, sort of. After noticing that the ability of bosses to invade their employees’ home lives via smartphone at any hour of the day or night was enabling real work hours to extend further and further beyond the 35-hour week the country famously introduced in 1999, workers’ unions have been fighting back. Now employers’ federations and unions have signed a new, legally binding labour agreement that will require employers to make sure staff “disconnect” outside of working hours.
Under the deal, which affects around 250,000 employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, Deloitte and PwC), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers orsmartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. And companies must ensure that their employees come under no pressure to do so. Thus the spirit of the law – and of France – as well as the letter shall be observed
Extracted from theguardian
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By Nixon Kanali