Ottawa should join the push for the right to disconnect from work

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/10/2021 (1059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Credit where credit is due.

The Ford government is getting some things right on the labour file.

Those words don’t trip easily off the tongue, as readers of this space will appreciate. We haven’t hesitated to castigate the Progressive Conservatives for their too-late, too-slow, too-inadequate, often-regressive legislative changes to the world of work. The imperceptible 10-cent-an-hour increase to the minimum wage, which came into effect at the beginning of this month, was only the latest blow.

With its Working for Workers Act, tabled on Monday, the Ford government has signalled that it is at least awake to the changing nature of work and the deleterious impacts on employees who are losing control of their working lives. Make that their lives, period.

Banning the use of so-called noncompete agreements, which tie workers to existing employers and restrict their mobility, not to mention their wage bargaining power, is one of the welcome advances in the legislation.

Another is enshrining a worker’s right to disconnect. Employers with more than 25 employees will be required to have in place a written policy detailing an employee’s right not to respond to emails, phone calls, video calls or “the sending or reviewing of other messages,” thereby empowering workers to set themselves free from what the legislation calls the “performance of work.”

Employees must be provided with the company’s policy within 30 days of starting work.

Skeptics may see this simply as an easy, no-cost way for the Ford crew to earn a Brownie point or two.

But it’s essential that workers gain agency over their working lives, especially as the pandemic has turned eight-hour labour into a manager thinking, what’s the harm in sending an email at 10 p.m. expecting a fast response?

A failure to state, and stick to, work parameters not only undermines the concept of fair pay, but exacerbates worker burnout, which has been well documented over these past months.

Both those factors led to legislation in France long before the pandemic upended working lives. The right to disconnect passed into French law in 2017 and was born from a challenge to the firing of an employee on the grounds that he failed to answer his phone outside of working hours.

No question the pandemic pushed the need to disconnect to the forefront. In January of this year the European Parliament approved a resolution that protects a worker’s right to cut the communication cord, deeming this a “fundamental right” in the digital era. A vast majority of members agreed that the “always on” communication culture during the COVID crisis has led to anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.

Last spring, a code of practice on the right to disconnect came into effect in Ireland. Company-specific policies must stipulate, legislators said, when situations deem it necessary to contact staff beyond working hours. Ireland was motivated not just by the negative effects of boundaryless work, but by the need to support remote and flexible work as a way of encouraging more people to settle in rural regions. So it’s a piece of national economic policy, too.

And then there’s Ottawa. The Trudeau government struck an expert panel on federal labour standards, including the right to disconnect, early in 2019. In its report, issued in December of that year, the panel concluded that even though existing labour standards are insufficient to set boundaries between work and personal time, and even though work-life “interference” has led to high levels of burnout – and this was before the pandemic — it would be too difficult to “operationalize” the curtailing of communications outside of regular working hours. And anyway, the group noted, no provinces or territories had provided such a legal right to workers.

Well, those tables have been turned. Seamus O’Regan, the newly named federal labour minister, should take this on as a first order of business. In so doing he would be a champion of worker rights, and their mental health.