Posted on 03/31/2014 12:58:29 PM PDT by MNDude
Germany's labor ministry has banned managers from calling or emailing staff out of hours except in emergencies. The ministry says the measure is intended to prevent staff from suffering undue stress by being constantly on call.
Daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Friday that the ministry is following the lead of major German companies such as automaker Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom.
Lol! Where’s my passport...
The off switch is your friend.
It wouldn’t work in my little corner of the IT biz. Fortunately for me, if the Boss does call...it’s an emergency or about to become something we can spend five minutes fixing now or five hours fixing in the morning.
I got news for you. This goes on in America too. I am a manager in my company and I am not allowed to contact any employee after 5PM unless I am willing to pay them overtime.
In this glowBull economy, how is this going to work with a German manager contacting workers in the US, India, Austrailia?
When we go to a one-world-govt, will we go to a one-world-time-zone as well?
I’m on the fence for this one. On 1 hand, stuff needs to get fixed right away. There are emergencies so you need ot be contacted. On the other, a rude boss can call you for minor reasons after hours making you feel like you never leave work.
Lets just let the business decide huh government?
Wow, real nanny state. A company I worked for gave us all Blackberries and we were on call 24/7. If the alarm went off there as a 20 person call list. Whoever answered would have to drive, some of them an hour or more, to the plant and let the cops in. Amazingly, it always cycled through all 20 and ended up with the president. They all claimed to be out of range. But I knew they did what I did and shut the damned thing off at night. OH, the the best part? There was no extra pay and no time off for the inconvenience.
Cue in the Freepers to tell us all how the Germans are such hard workers. (snort, chuckle....)
Manager telefonisch oder per E-Mail Mitarbeiter nach der Arbeit verbieten
What if you have auto-foward on (like you want your message forwarded to your secretary while you’re out of town, then you have to turn it off?
What if a manager wants to wish someone a happy birthday, they can’t do that?
It’s not often that I’m reading the news about my industry after hours, and forward it on to everyone on my team. Forwarding news articles would be prohibited as well?
As someone else mentioned, what if that employee is working remote in a different time zone and has different work hours?
Seems like it’s more from the usual “Work is a pain in the ass” crowd.
One of our clients, a railroad, has asked us to restrict ourselves from calling their maintenance personnel directly, as they may be in their government-mandated rest period at any given time. This can happen when they’ve had to work overtime and their rest period extends into the next normal working hours.
Instead, we are asked to contact their supervisor, who can advise whether the employee is actually working at that time.
Those hours of service laws are a pain, but they are so very necessary to help protect the railroads - and the employees themselves - from accidents that are caused/contributed to by lack of adequate rest.
As a repair contractor, I had to threaten to dump a customer who kept calling me to set up routine appointments and to discuss routine business after work hours and on weekends, once he figured out that I worked out of my home and answered my telephone 24 hours a day.
I told him that I answered the phone after hours and on weekends in case someone had an emergency call, and that he needed to make his routine calls during business hours and quit bothering me when I was off work.
He was always a mild acting, passive-aggressive kind of guy, and was clearly doing it as some kind of power trip, I had to tell him to stop doing it, or find another contractor.
My wife has a company provided cell phone that she has to keep with her. She doesn’t mind, it’s one of the conditions of employment in her position.
I am sometimes required to be on call (without pay) over the weekends. If I get called and have to work I get paid, which is fine, but I get no calls (and no pay) most times despite being tethered to the phone all weekend. That doesn’t seem fair to me.
This crap has been going on for years. When I was working for a Fortune 50 company 10 years+ ago, it was common to exchange email over nights and weekends, especailly as we were supposed to be “part of a global management team”. Except, the EUro-based members of said team got special dispensation to ignore anything outside working hours, due to the same kind of thinking put forth here. You’d be accused of “not thinking globally” if you didn’t involve them, or catch hell for being slow to respond if you waited until they were finished sipping wine and noshing on brie.
And heaven help you if you ever so much as think about shutting down a factory or office in Europe. There’ll be a walk-out the next day and you’ll be paying them a lifetime annuity even if you do it.
That's my gripe too. I'll live with the on call part but I should get something for my inconvenience.
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