New French law gives employees right to ignore work emails

The average United States office worker now clocks around 47 hours a week, and 17 percent have said they have trouble finding enough work-life balance to enjoy leisure activities without distractions from work. In 2012, Atos CEO Thierry Breton announced plans to ban all internal email after a “Wellbeing at Work” program found that employees spent 15 to 20 hours a week answering and deleting emails.

France’s work week is 35 hours, a standard set in 2000.

Sorry Americans, but 2017 probably won’t offer you much more work-life balance.

“Many workers, particularly men, are donating unpaid time”. I’m thrilled with this law because of all of the benefits that there will be for the employees and the businesses. With this move, the country seeks to tackle the “always on” work culture.

But by the 1970s, the steady decline in the average length of the American workweek reversed itself. In 2013, Germany’s labor minister limited after-hours communication in her department to “exceptional cases”. We had volunteered to exhaust ourselves.

The measure is one of a package of labour reforms introduced by François Hollande’s Socialist Party government in a bid to gain credibility for tackling economic issues ahead of this year’s presidential election.

Would you support a similar law in the U.S.?

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work”.

Barry Drexler: “In theory, it may be a good idea to protect people’s personal lives, but in practice it could be problematic”, said Barry Drexler, President of Drexler Consulting. It is not the first time that a bill like that has been proposed in France.

Supporters of the law claim that employees that are required to work out of hours aren’t being compensated for the extra work.

The country, which already has a 35-hour work week, is also part of the European Union where the court had ruled that travelling to work by tradesmen who don’t have a fixed office like the gasfitters, sales representatives, is also work. Critics worry that the legislation could cause France to fall behind foreign competitors; others just don’t want the government to interfere in this area. Many experts say no.

“The people who reported it being most useful to them also reported the highest levels of email pressure”.