I don’t understand why anyone continues to live or work in California, a state with a culture that lurches between stupid, irresponsible and deluded.
The headline above does not refer to the recent, bone-headed decision to give fast-food workers up to a 25% raise, with cooking Big Macs the minimum wage jumping to $20 an hour in that sector next week. “It’s a big win for cooks, cashiers and other fast-food workers ” says taxpayer-funded progressive propaganda organ NPR. Right. Fast food wages have been growing at a faster clip than almost any other sector since the pandemic, with the result that more outlets are moving to automation, which means, as has happened every time the minimum wage jumps, lower-paid workers—whose skills often aren’t worth the minimum wage— will lose their jobs. Meanwhile, fewer people with strained budgets will buy fast food because of the duel problems that it’s no longer fast, and is absurdly expensive, and California is already one of the most expensive states.
Oh, who knows: maybe all those vegans and health nuts in the Golden State want to wreck the fast food business. More likely, however, it’s just that legislators there—Suspense! Will they actually vote to make all Californians-of-the-right-color millionaires?—don’t understand economics, cause-and-effect and reality.
But I find the proposed law this post concerns more offensive from an ethics point of view if less destructive. California Assemblyman Matt Haney wants California to be the first in the country to give employees the legal right refuse to respond if their superior calls after hours. Then the law would permit workers to ignore emails, texts and other work-related communications until the next day after the work day has begun. “People now find themselves always on and never off,” the Nanny State fan said. “There’s an availability creep that has reached into many people’s lives, and I think it’s not a positive thing for people’s happiness, for their well-being, or even for work productivity.”
Oh, shut up. The law aims to give workers a legal right to be unprofessional. If you have a job and believe in ethical work values, you believe in diligence, responsibility and self-sacrifice. If you believe in personal autonomy and character, you believe that human beings need to be able to make intelligent choices about their life, including their careers, without being bolstered by the legal right to stand up to bullies, jerks and unreasonable supervisors.
In my business, which admittedly isn’t looking too Smurfy these days, my clients are my bosses. I get phone calls from them after hours frequently, because they are lawyers and work under deadlines, and their problems are my problems. When they call, I presume it’s for a good reason, and I respond. This is simple Golden Rule stuff: if I had something happening that was so important I felt it necessary to call an employee or associate late at night or over the weekend, I would want to know that individual would be ready to help out. If they wouldn’t be ready to help out, I wouldn’t trust them any more.
Haney’s law would encourage people to be untrustworthy, specifically people who don’t believe in professionalism. Some readers were shocked when I revealed here that I went ahead and fulfilled my obligation to teach a Zoom CLE seminar on professionalism despite discovering my wife dead in the living room 90 minutes earlier. My house was filled with EMTs and police; her body hadn’t been removed yet. But I had a job to do, people were depending on me, my son was capable of dealing with the situation, and the topic was professionalism, dammit.
I’m sure California would like to pass a law that gave me a legal right not to do my job in the wake of a personal tragedy, which would, in turn, represent a statement by the government that my approach to job-related duties and responsibilities is wrong and bad for society. It is not wrong; it is ethical, but California’s public favors illegal immigration, shoplifting, legalized addictive drug use, so what do they know? If I felt a boss was abusing the privilege of calling on me to work after hours, I would tell him or her so, because I am a free human being, and not a weenie. If the boss protested or tried to force or threaten me, I would quit, perhaps after saying, “Bite me.” Quitting work relationships that are unfair, abusive, or disrespectful is a good habit to develop: I, like my father, and, I am proud to say, my son, have benefited from that habit, if not financially, then spiritually, several times.
Haney, (guess which party!) says he got the idea from Australia’s new “right to disconnect” law. Naturally, he views an infamous nanny state as a role model for the United States of America. The law from Down-Under will allow workers to reject “unreasonable” professional communication outside of their regular workday. (And what’s unreasonable?) This bad idea originated in France—another great role model— and has metastasized to Canada, Italy, Belgium and the Philippines.
I’ll decide when a boss is being unreasonable and what to do about it, because I am an adult, I am an American, American shouldn’t take crap from anyone, and I don’t need the government to be encouraging me to be less than professional.
Ethics Alarms 
“This is simple Golden Rule stuff: if I had something happening that was so important I felt it necessary to call an employee or associate late at night or over the weekend, I would want to know that individual would be ready to help out. If they wouldn’t be ready to help out, I wouldn’t trust them any more.”
Ok, here is the thing. A lot of employers don’t give a crap about their employees, much less people who are 3rd party employees. I work at a job where I am a 3rd party vendor. I am the onsite tech lead. I have an offshore team. I am a very strict tech lead, who makes sure that my offshore team works hard, is competent, and is very client oriented. None of that matters to my client. The client deliberately hires all of its software engineers from 3rd party vendors, many of which are incompetent, because it is cheaper and tax incentives to do so are attractive. The client managers do not want to waste 1 iota of time figuring out which offshore teams are competent, so they call me 100% of the time whether they need to or not. 3 am and a random location broke something? Call Null Pointer! Does it matter that there is a perfectly competent offshore team who is working during normal business hours? Nope! That would require the client to know which teams do their jobs and which teams don’t. Who wants to take the time to do that? No one. Particularly the client.
The only person who cares me. I have to say, I am very, very, very tired of working my ass off and no one noticing or caring or taking 2 seconds of time to figure out which of their teams is remotely competent. Now, I could quit, but where would I go? To another fortune 500 company that does the exact same crap? What is the point. There are literally no companies in the field in which I work who don’t do the exact same behaviors. Taxes incentivize bad employer behavior. Taxes are a much bigger incentive than employee happiness. Now, I am a hard worker, so I answer the phone and take the message, even when I get woken up in the middle of the night for no reason whatsoever and there are people who actually are supposed to be taking these calls who both could and would do what needs to be done. I then pass off the information to those people, who do what needs to be done. But it is a very demotivating experience to realize that your employer is this careless with your time and health to wake you up at in the middle of the night for no reason whatsoever. It is infuriating. Especially when you consider that your government created the situation in the first place by incentivizing companies to treat people this way. They offshore almost everything, and then overload the onshore people with work because the offshore teams are usually incompetent and even when they are not why bother to find that information out?
This is one of those things where when the ethics system fails then the law takes over. Even when the law created the situation in the first place.
In some sense, what gets rewarded gets repeated.
You can begin to “train” your customers. Once they learn who to call, they will.
Depending on your workload/customer volume you might always get some 3am calls, but you do have a choice.
A lot of us tend to think, well nobody else is going to do this, and it needs done, so I’m going to do it. Except that it becomes literally impossible since the company has set you up to fail (impossible work loads), then blames you. Both my wife’s company and my prior one operate that way, and it’s caused us health problems.
We get one life, our families care about us, our companies really don’t. Even at good companies run the right way, they will replace you as soon as you fall over dead, say nice guy, and a month later your name will never come up.
Yeah, we have to pay bills, etc, but it’s family and sanity over all else. The consequences of any other focus are just too high.
<i>In my business, which admittedly isn’t looking too Smurfy these days, my clients are my bosses. I get phone calls from them after hours frequently, because they are lawyers and work under deadlines, and their problems are my problems. When they call, I presume it’s for a good reason, and I respond. This is simple Golden Rule stuff: if I had something happening that was so important I felt it necessary to call an employee or associate late at night or over the weekend, I would want to know that individual would be ready to help out. If they wouldn’t be ready to help out, I wouldn’t trust them any more.</i>
You are not a W-2 employee, though.
The b ill seems to go too far.
I do believe that the law should require that if an employer requires an W-2 employee to respond to calls, e-mails or texts outside of normal work hours, then the employer should be on the hook for either one hour or the length of the time of the call, whichever is greater. Whether or not this should be considered overtime should be based on how many hours worked in the pasty twenty-four hours.
This is similarly to the principle that if an hourly employee is “on call” (required to work at a moment’s notice) the time spent on call is work time and must be paid.
just say no. However, be prepared for fallout!
But of course. Standing up for yourself always requires acceptance of risk and consequences. The earlier in life you decide not be a victim, a doormat, a lackey, a chump and weenie, the better off you’ll be.
Truth.
Many are the bosses that think they essentially own their employees. In a meeting during covid, probably because people were maybe not working up to snuff, the current head of my department shouted at everyone that if he called us at 3:00 a.m. we had better pick up and we had better have answers and those answers had better be good. In the legal business I can’t imagine what would require a call at 3:00 a.m. unless you are in international business. This was pure and simple bullying, and I think it’s probably why turnover has been so high in our office in the last few years.
Our current management team tends to make bad decisions and then they blame their subordinates when things go south. Of course you know what flows downhill, and all of us tend to abuse those below us as a result. The other day when a plaintiff’s attorney called me up demanding a settlement check that hasn’t been cut yet because he didn’t turn in all the paperwork that’s required he called me the most ridiculous attorney in the state and accuse me of playing games. I exploded at him, told him he was a bottom feeding scumbag and said that if I see him around the courthouse I’ll deck him. It’s one thing to stand up for yourself, but I think I might have overdone it there.
I like the idea behind the law. Unfortunately, it’s often all too easy for a business to fire someone for an unrelated reason, such as an equally unreasonable expectation which doesn’t happen to be illegal. This proposed law is an attempt to patch up a symptom, which is what often happens when the state tries to solve problems with laws.
However, bad companies can only function because workers can’t find anywhere else to go that isn’t just as bad. Ideally, if we can figure out ways to make it easier for people to leave jobs and find new ones (and survive long enough in the meantime), that would give employees the power to push back against unfair treatment. Then employment in general would improve, and with it the economy.
The part that concerns people is figuring out ways to allow people to walk away from jobs more easily while still incentivizing people to work, including making sure that small businesses can afford to pay enough to attract workers. (The large ones can definitely afford it.) I think a cultural shift towards pride in work will be much easier if we can make employment shift towards rewarding skill and advancing meaningful goals rather than propping up incompetence and consumerism.