I think "this doesn't happen to me" is a valid response. We're all here sharing.

I find the internet full of panic and fear and negativity these days and it overstates how pervasive a thing is.

Example: I travel to Disney World sometimes. There's a recent hubub about transportation and the blame is all on "OMG THE INFLUENCERS ARE EVERYWHERE".

In those situations it's interesting how many people will spread those stories about influencers saturating the park / causing problems and yet ... most every user who replies "I've never seen one at the park".

Everyone's experience is valid IMO. Everyone gets to express their lived experience.

There used to be a lot of "abusive start up demands massive hours" talk on HN. I actually think people expressing how it isn't that way everywhere / doesn't have to be that way is VERY helpful. Folks in those situations now know that maybe they have options.

"Privilege is thinking that something isn't a problem because it doesn't affect you personally." is a sticker I bought once.

Teachers have it the worst. For many of them, there is no way to do the job right without bringing work home and being available after hours.

Tech sales can be just as bad. This is more understandable, but if customers didn't work outside of work hours, sales folks wouldn't need to either (since speed outside of work would no longer be an advantage).

I think in many cases this has less to do with incuriosity and more to do with denial.

Are there particular responses you have in mind? I can find two comments making this point, one which opens with

>Maybe I just have abnormal leverage

while the other opens with

>I'm curious

The top two top-level comments are responding to this trend, so I assume it is or was present, but I'm not seeing it. I do wish people would reply to the comments they find objectionable instead of doing these meta comments subtweeting them because I find I run into this issue often lately here (pot-kettle objection noted and accurate).

Despite dang and others saying x or y about Hacker News and how such and such is a noob opinion—-the people themselves, the demographic, has changed and I’ve seen it over the years.

> Someone is telling you the world works differently for them than it does for you, which means you've got an opportunity to learn something new about the world and expand your model.

...than it does for you, which means there's an opportunity for someone to expend resources verifying and characterizing the claimed difference.

> someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift.

I'm not sure about that, but to your higher point, HN hasn't taken pride in it's nominative determinism nature, nor does it appear to be a desired trait from the majority. But the continued enshittifcation aside, "it doesn't happen to me" is still a useful observation. That shouldn't be read as a refutation, because I already agree with your point. The intent of most of the comments your objecting to, likely does come from a narcissistic compulsion, to turn the topic to something about them.

But I could easily say "it doesn't happen to me" while (poorly) trying to convey a message of encouragement towards self-confidence, and self-worth. Rather, it doesn't happen to me, because I haven't been gaslit into the shared and common delusion that: if you get fired, it'll because of something you did, and not because your manager felt like it. "Employee didn't answer the call/message at 10pm" is the reason they'll invent to fire you after they've decided to fire you. It won't be the root cause. You can just turn your messages off, and nothing bad will happen because you didn't respond.

Are there dysfunctional companies where something like that will get you fired? Absolutely! I would have hoped that existing wrongful termination laws would have already prevented this kinda thing, (if they don't that's a much larger problem) but I have no objections to making this an explicit law to compel the behavior of the sub-human group that would rather mistreat their coworkers. But given that within places that behave like this, this law would only fix a small subset of the pervasive human rights abuses inflicted during non-working hours. I feel like something more expansive should be done to protect those people from clearly abusive behavior.

I still expect that the vast majority of the people that would benefit from this, could simply just turn their phone off, and no one would notice... because while it's a problem, that does happen to some people, one that needs to be fixed! It doesn't happen to me, and probably doesn't really happen to you (most people) either.

Most of the roles I've had involved irregular and long hours. In most cases, I've been happy to take these roles.

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.

> a lot of people who are victims of

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?

> It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.

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 is this a government issue at all? It was unclear from the article why some contingent that doesn't like their relationship with their employer ought to be able to inflict their solution on everyone in Michigan via politics as the mechanism instead of the market

one of the most common in lower paying jobs is just CONSTANT scheduling churn, group texts with the entire restaurant/bar you're supposed to on. Instead of having a normal schedule everything is ad hoc

Buddha was exceptional because he actually WANTED to know what was going on outside of his luxury palace.

Most people just want to pretend everything is fine. They sleep better at night.

I use 2 different email apps for exactly this reason. I can check my work email if I need to, but I don’t want notifications.

Check out Buzzkill, its a great app for managing notification rules. You can set it to hide and batch up notifications during your off hours and show them later.

> Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal.

You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.

Second phone?

> Then, probably 15 years ago, they decided to give everyone a little raise, based on how much on-call work they did in the previous year, then ended the extra payment for on-call. Anyone who was hired for, or moved into, a position that required on-call work got nothing and continues to get nothing.

If Alex was previously on-call from time to time and got a raise to account for that typical amount of on-call, it sounds like you think that's fair? (It does sound fair to me.) Then, Bailey is hired at the same exact pay as Alex and also has to occasionally be on-call. Is Bailey truly "getting nothing"? Is Alex's pay fair and Bailey's identical pay unfair? I don't think so.

If you want to pass a law that requires employers to divide up pay differently than they currently do, that's totally fine; in some corner cases, it will result in a net pay increase for lower-paid employees.

I don’t live in Michigan but my employer gives you close to 1k extra a month and pays for your phone an internet bill for being on call.

They generally let people volunteer to be on call. But since everyone wants their weekends and evening it’s usually the same person. One of the other devs and I have been on primary rotation for about 2 1/2 years now. It’s a shame more employees don’t compensate for on call better. And honestly our teams on call is not a regular occurrence it’s maybe once every 2 weeks we’ll get a call for something that’s a 5 minute fix.

A similar enshittification has happened in my state regarding wages. They slightly increased minimum wage but then stripped out extra pay on Sundays.

It's happening all the time. Lobbied legislators will give some token QoL improvement for the masses and then give the 0.1% a nice big gimme in return.

When US people come to Europe, they are shocked because indeed a business closes at 2 pm, and if you arrive at 2:05 pm it is your fault. If your contract says 9-5, you are not expected to work at 6 pm in the name of customers. The business need to hire someone to cover the evening, and customers get used to buy things in comercial hours.

Yes, some people do overtime, but society structured around the fact that workers are people too with a right to free (truly free) time, and maybe you as a customer don't have a "right" to be feed at 2 am, or to buy stuff on sundays. Even if that means we are "europoor" or customers pay higher prices, something that economic theory asserts but reality not so much.

All of these are the problem of the business, and negatively impact the employees ability to disconnect and enjoy their free time.

If you need an executive assistant to be available in the evenings, hire evening cover. If it's not worth it to the employer pay for that cover, then why should it be on the employee to do that work for free during their time off?

Employers need to remember that employees often don't have a stake in the business. Free extra work gains them nothing, and loses them what little free time they had. That's not a trade, it's theft of time through a power imbalance.

It's reasonable for a business to pay the proper price for the full services it receives from it's staff. Businesses have proven they're unable to be fair in this regard, so it's reasonable to regulate them.

> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.

The only reason we get compensated at all is because of legislation. They'll pay us as little and work us as hard as they're legally and physically able to.

The very first paragraph in TFA says:

> ... rules on when and for what reason an employer could contact an employee outside of a normal work schedule.

This is no blanket 'thou shalt not call thy employees after hours' law.

All this is doing is preventing employers from effectively pulling a bait and switch, by implicitly expecting employees to be available 24/7 for whatever reason. If you've ever been in a situation where your boss just fucking calls you because of some asinine reason ("hey I just had an idea...) then you know how terrible it is. Nothing spoilt my weekends as much as a boss calling and I'm thinking "o shit prod is down" or whatever, and then it's just him asking on a delivery date for a feature because he's having drinks with the client now and they were asking.

Now, if there is a requirement for after hours availability, it has to be stated in the contract, and the compensation must accordingly reflect this additional requirement.

I think it's great this is happening.

Legislation only exists because some people won't be good people without a stick involved. So, in general, I think your expectation is valid, but that's not what you use the stick for.

As an employee you want to be able to draw the line, and this lets you do that. When you need to do that, you're already in a pretty bad position to begin with

> I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation.

Then you'd still need legislation for the compensation, or it ain't happening.

> Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list.

Not allowed to require someone to pick up the phone != not allowed to call them. And I think some general sense still applies, the spirit of the law, if you will. If it happens rarely, is only about important stuff, is not taken for granted (!), I think most people wouldn't mind. If you treat a worker well and appreciate them doing something they didn't have to do, they will notice. And if they're a jerk causing grief for the company over technicalities, just because they can, you will notice, and the sooner the better.

But let's say no, you can't even look at them once they're off the clock, much less ask them anything. Then the person who fucked up the handover will never do whatever mistake lead to that again. If it was an unavoidable thing, something that just happens every now and then, a cosmic ray that flipped a bit -- why expect to be able to externalize those costs to the unpaid worker? It's part of the business, whatever that business is.

> eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.

Funny how it's never the third yacht for the CEO who cannot even not look goofy on one that does that, but grandma not being called from one of her 3 jobs at 2am, that will absolutely drive costs through the roof!

Kidding aside though, you opened with

> my friends would de-prioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good. Why can't we do that in most other job categories as well?

But by the end of your comment, this is a problem that raises prices for everyone? Huh? Am I missing something?

And hey, it also slightly raises salaries and lowers blood pressure for everyone. It means that when a company does something for me, I know someone wasn't mistreated to make it happen. That's just a cool thing I want as much of in my life as possible.

> But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening

Thanks for making the case for laws like this.

It may only seem like a small ask for you to tell an EA to do something afterhours but it's a significant amount of work on their end and it restricts the kind of activities they can do because you have effectively made them on call 24/7.

You're basically the reason these rules are being proposed.

It only bans uncontracted oncall. If your job description includes on call responsibilities (and compensates for them appropriately), it doesn’t appear that would be a problem?

If you make over $130k then you make enough that you can be worked 24/7 without violating a $15 minimum wage + 1.5x over 40 hours per week.

Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes).

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.

I'm SRE/Platform, I got paged out last night because Devs apparently can't properly crash applications. Sure, I can move hours as well but my partner doesn't care that I get off at 3 on this Friday instead of 5, she has to work till 5 and my page out interrupted our outing to the movies. Not everyone life is ultra flexible.

> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

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.

It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.

Usually about covering shifts.

You are lucky in that you don’t have the type of employer who needs to be reined in via the law.

There are some true scumbags out there.

This is a pretty self-selecting group, so I'm not surprised that most people reading this don't have a problem with after-hours coms. If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage. It's irritating.

> Maybe I just have abnormal leverage

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.

Loads of jobs where this is expected: sales, education, hospitality, definitely the entertainment industry, etc.

You probably have been just lucky with your bosses?

Slack also works on weekends and at the AM

Your fortunate. If you’re adjacent to operations or power, after hours comms is a common experience.

As an employer (in the US) I have always had the impression that I'd risk being on the hook for overtime or some other form of additional compensation if I routinely engaged in communication with employees out of hours, so unless the place was on fire I never did. As an "employee" (contractor) I managed my own hours and adopted a pragmatic approach: if the client was paying $$$ I'd respond if it didn't interfere with my personal life, unless they were being dickish about it, in which case I'd bring it up as an issue and if necessary drop the client.

A friend with an iPhone runs his a couple businesses with the Quo app (nee OpenPhone) which allows him to manage calls/sms for multiple business numbers from his personal phone while allowing him to automatically disable ringing after 5pm when he leaves the office to be a family man.

My problem is that my customers prefer to reach me over iMessage, and porting my number to any "business phone in an app" means I'd be downgrading to unreliable SMS in a green bubble. So if I want to separate work/personal use, I'd need to carry a second iPhone.

It doesn't. As drafted it applies to exempt employees. (It's just a proposed bill; it's unlikely to happen and if it picked up any steam presumably it would be drafted more carefully.)

At least an ongoing retainer fee, plus paying for time spent dealing with comms.

While I understand how you can see it this way, laws like this have worked in many other places (yes some of those were places where employers had fewer options to move interstate, but that’s a costly thing to do for employers)

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.

Citizens are not employees of politicians. Only the politician’s staffers are.

Arguably the politician works for us so we can decide their working hours.

I've worked at companies that don't outright require it, but they utilize a few workaholic employees to set an expectation sane people can't live up to. It creates a stressful environment where expectations are unclear. Combine that with the current job market and you effectively hold your employees hostage.

You are lucky. This bill is for the unlucky, because luck is not a strategy as it relates to labor rights and protections.

Then you're on the clock and by definition not after (your) hours.

HN has a restriction on title length. I had to shorten the title somewhere. I’m curious what you would have shortened instead of just being snarky.

a major function of the law is to mediate between groups that have unequal power

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?

> This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract

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.

You have a point, and I share your general concern with bureaucracy. However, I'd encourage you to consider how I've seen employment law situations like this play out in practice.

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.