The Right to Disconnect From Work

Opinion – The MSU Exponent

On Jan. 1, 2017, French workers gained a right which is found absolutely nowhere else: the right to ignore their bosses over the weekend. Companies with over 50 employees are required to set hours when workers will no longer send or receive emails, pushing back against corporations’ digitally-enabled incursion into private time.
In the United States, younger employees are hit hardest by this invasion of their free time and are seen as inferior workers because, according to one scathing article, “many millennials leave work on the dot of 5 p.m. every day and refuse to answer work calls or emails over the weekend.” The fact that this is absolutely their right, as well as the way work should function in a healthy society, seems never to have crossed the author’s mind. Employees who are willing to work beyond their stated hours are seen as more dedicated, creating a race to the bottom. Workers who naively think that a day off means genuine freedom from work will miss out on promotions and raises, ratcheting up the pressure to be perpetually available.
While this trend is more prevalent in office work, it also occurs in the kind of retail and food service jobs that many MSU students depend on to get by during the school year. Students have class and homework during their days off and the demand for constant availability can limit their ability to succeed academically. In my own school-year job, I was threatened with termination because I went hiking on my day off and my boss couldn’t reach me on my cell phone. Retailers and fast food restaurants schedule their employees so thinly that any single low-level employee calling in sick means that employers are left either losing hundreds or thousands of dollars of profit, which cannot be sacrificed, or taking one of their employees’ days off, which always can.
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