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.
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.
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
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?
> 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/...
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).
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'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.
Slack also works on weekends and at the AM
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.
There are some true scumbags out there.
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.
cebert•1h ago