Germany Considers Outlawing Employers Emailing Employees After Work Hours
Germany Considers Outlawing Employers Emailing Employees
After Work Hours
By Romina Boccia December 01, 2014
Germans refer to “Close of Business” as Feierabend, which
literally translated means something like party night. Now some in Germany want
to impose a work communications blackout during this sacred time.
Germany already mandates a host of labor policies,
including a minimum of 24 paid vacation days plus holidays and 14 weeks of paid
maternity leave.
The recently proposed no-work-communications-after-hours
regulation would forbid employers from contacting their employees via email or
phone call past their scheduled working hours.
Hanns Pauli, health and safety expert for the Federation
of German Trade Unions, suggested that contacting workers after hours “crosses
a sacrosanct line in Germany between work and leisure,” according to NPR.
German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles is reportedly calling for an “anti-stress
regulation.”
As is so often the case, nanny state policies like this
one being considered in Germany, end up hurting workers the most, in contrast
to the policies’ stated intentions.
In the same way that the Obamacare employer mandate is
hurting Americans’ full-time employment prospects, mandated benefits are
pushing many Germans to accept part-time, or contract work—because companies
are less likely to hire full-time permanent employees, due to the amount of
regulations. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of Germans in part-time
employment rose by 43 percent. Among men, the number doubled during this
period.
A no-work-communications-after-hours policy could harm
parents in particular. Rigid, inflexible work policies are exactly the wrong
medicine for improving work-life balance. Many parents value being able to
leave the office some afternoons to see their kid’s soccer game and don’t mind
making up for lost work time after dinner, for example. Such arrangements would
get harder to come by.
Moreover, it is unclear that a sizable portion of
employees are bothered by email after hours. According to polling by the German
health insurance carrier DAK, a mere 4 percent of employees strongly object to
reading their work email after hours and on the weekend. Many find it helpful
to be able to combine leisure time and work thanks to electronic communication
devices. Nevertheless, some companies have chosen to literally pull the plug,
like Volkswagen which turns off its email servers after hours.
Instead of a misguided one-size-fits-all solution to what
seems at this point to be a largely imagined problem, the best policy is one
arrived at by mutual consent between employers and their employees. The good
news is that Angela Merkel has shown little interest in burdening the German
economy with even more labor regulations.
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