Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times.
I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.
I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.
Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
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.
Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.
> Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck
My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?
My IT department and I fully support staff requesting YubiKeys, there’s no concept of being a “troublemaker” for having boundaries and respecting security requirements. I’d talk to your IT management if your company culture seems different, I bet the actual techs do not have an issue with this.
Seems pretty in line with a recent frontpost of "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It " [1].
There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.
>In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.
I would install the app on the shittiest iPhone backup i have (I must have like 10 iPhones by now, i dont sell old ones)
You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)
Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too
Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.
Maybe I just have abnormal leverage but I've never had after hours coms be an issue.
I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
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.
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.
I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?
I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.
In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
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.)
Hot take: The reality is unless this becomes a ban on after hours coms (which likely isn't feasible), economic incentives will prevail. Folks that are less available, less engaged, and in less communication will be darwin'd out.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
It kind of baffles me that this needs to be a bill. I guess I'm lucky that I've never worked for a company that required me to be constantly online. (I work remotely for a US company, work European working hours, and nobody requires me to be online outside of them.)
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.
While I don't disagree with the intent, the reality is that workers are already at a significant disadvantage and many don't feel they have the leverage to be more firm about boundaries (with most of them feeling this way being correct about their lack of leverage).
Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
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.
I won't say that laws like this can't have any impact, but it's a global marketplace and change is constant.
Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.
Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.
Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".
It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
Regardless of whether people agree with the concept or not, this seems like excessive bureaucracy. This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract and it seems like just paperwork to have more laws saying that someone's reasonable working hours are indeed their agreed reasonable working hours. It shouldn't and probably doesn't need an act to metaphorically underline a short phrase in a contract. It is just creating drag on small businesses and that sort of thing costs money. I suppose this is an opportunity to link my favourite article reminding everyone that petty business regulation pretty much just makes countries poorer [0].
It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.
I'm just going off the summary document [0], but the law doesn't seem to require any particular working hours. It just says people should stick to them once they've been agreed. That's already implied by having working hours. The whole bill basically just tells the regulator that the legislature thinks the fine for not sticking to the employment contract should be up to $500 which is probably redundant since I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts. And they shouldn't need special and specific powers to fine someone for particular employment contract violations, if they're going to have power they should have general powers.
> taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I don't see how the bill or anything I wrote have anything to do with group negotiations. People can negotiate as a group for all I care, as long as I can negotiate on my own.
Android used to have an "office hours" setting which would prevent specific email accounts from notifying you outside of your specified times.
I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.
I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.
Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.
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.
Second phone?
Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck, nothing for $job gets put onto my private phone. If they think they need this ability, then they also need to add a line item to their budgets for the cost of the phone and the service. And when faced with this alternative, they have not, so far, decided they want to pay for a phone.
> Indeed. If $job is not willing to buy and hand me a "work phone" then they are out of luck
My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
Where do you draw the line? If the employer wants you to install a 2FA app on your phone, do you demand a separate phone or alternate 2FA device for that and mark yourself as a troublemaker? Or do you just do what 99.8% of the staff does and install the app?
My IT department and I fully support staff requesting YubiKeys, there’s no concept of being a “troublemaker” for having boundaries and respecting security requirements. I’d talk to your IT management if your company culture seems different, I bet the actual techs do not have an issue with this.
> Where do you draw the line?
If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device".
My private phone is not for their use, ever.
Seems pretty in line with a recent frontpost of "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It " [1].
There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689859
I'm happy to be the "troublemaker". In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
>In my experience, one troublemaker can often recruit others to their cause.
Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.
I would install the app on the shittiest iPhone backup i have (I must have like 10 iPhones by now, i dont sell old ones)
You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)
Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too
Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.
Maybe I just have abnormal leverage but I've never had after hours coms be an issue.
I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.
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.
You probably have been just lucky with your bosses?
Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?
I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.
In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.
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.
it's spelled "comms" although that is still jargon and the actual headline is "contact"
How would this interact with existing rules around exempt / non-exempt (roughly, salaried vs hourly) employees?
I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.
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.)
Direct link to the bill: https://legislature.mi.gov/Bills/Bill?ObjectName=2026-SB-094...
Hot take: The reality is unless this becomes a ban on after hours coms (which likely isn't feasible), economic incentives will prevail. Folks that are less available, less engaged, and in less communication will be darwin'd out.
Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.
It kind of baffles me that this needs to be a bill. I guess I'm lucky that I've never worked for a company that required me to be constantly online. (I work remotely for a US company, work European working hours, and nobody requires me to be online outside of them.)
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.
While I don't disagree with the intent, the reality is that workers are already at a significant disadvantage and many don't feel they have the leverage to be more firm about boundaries (with most of them feeling this way being correct about their lack of leverage).
Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).
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.
I won't say that laws like this can't have any impact, but it's a global marketplace and change is constant.
Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.
Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.
Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".
It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.
Regardless of whether people agree with the concept or not, this seems like excessive bureaucracy. This sort of thing should already be legal or illegal based on what is in an employment contract and it seems like just paperwork to have more laws saying that someone's reasonable working hours are indeed their agreed reasonable working hours. It shouldn't and probably doesn't need an act to metaphorically underline a short phrase in a contract. It is just creating drag on small businesses and that sort of thing costs money. I suppose this is an opportunity to link my favourite article reminding everyone that petty business regulation pretty much just makes countries poorer [0].
It reminds me of when politicians criminalise things that were already illegal to show that they are taking an interest in some crisis.
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation
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?
I'm just going off the summary document [0], but the law doesn't seem to require any particular working hours. It just says people should stick to them once they've been agreed. That's already implied by having working hours. The whole bill basically just tells the regulator that the legislature thinks the fine for not sticking to the employment contract should be up to $500 which is probably redundant since I assume the regulator (or someone, at any rate) can already fine people who don't stick to contracts. And they shouldn't need special and specific powers to fine someone for particular employment contract violations, if they're going to have power they should have general powers.
> taken to its logical extreme your argument would forbid all group negotiations, I'd think?
I don't see how the bill or anything I wrote have anything to do with group negotiations. People can negotiate as a group for all I care, as long as I can negotiate on my own.
[0] https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billanalysis/...