'Right to disconnect' recommended for Australian workers

A senate committee on Wednesday recommended Australia join the small handful of countries where people have a right to disconnect from their work environment out-of-hours.

The Senate Select Committee on Work and Care's interim report, tabled on Wednesday, made the recommendation.

It suggested the Fair Work Act (and other legislation, if required) be amended to enact the right, and to give people recourse to the Fair Work Commission if employers don’t enact or respect it.

If adopted, the recommendation said employers should have a “positive duty … to reasonably accommodate” the right to disconnect, wherever possible.

The right to disconnect, the report said, is needed to address the changes in “workplace boundaries” driven by technology and exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The changing ways of work in recent years with the advancement of technology has caused an ‘availability creep’, where employees feel they need to be available all the time to answer emails, calls or simply deal with their workload," the report states.

The right to disconnect should “support productive work from home and flexibility of work, while ensuring workers have the capacity to disconnect from their job and to work their contractual hours.”

Senior director of Gartner CIO advisory, Neha Kumar said the legislation is mirroring a movement towards flexibility she is seeing in Australia and the Asia Pacific.

“The talent market is such a big challenge, so leaders are focussing on employee wellbeing”, Kumar said.

Work-life balance is “one of the main attributes that people care about – it’s regularly among the top five attrition and attraction drivers”.

Public sector organisations, she said, are leading the way in offering more flexible arrangements in general, citing Victoria Police, which in 2021 adopted an enterprise bargaining agreement that included the right.

Right to disconnect legislation can, Kumar said, be seen as a way the government can bring the private sector along the same road.

Early leaders

While such a right is relatively new internationally, there are countries Australia could look to in working out how to legislate it.

France has led the way, having passed laws in 2017 that required employers to negotiate with unions over protecting staff’s home lives. It was followed by Italy, Spain, Belgium, Ireland and Portugal.

The right to disconnect is part of a broader focus by the committee on work flexibility, something brought into focus by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The committee also recommended that the Fair Work Act be amended so that all workers have the right to request flexible work, to “remove the stigma attached to its use when confined to carers”.

The current “reasonable business grounds” reason for refusing flexible work should be amended so employers can only refuse flexible arrangements on the grounds of “unjustifiable hardship”.

Employers would have a “positive duty” to “reasonably accommodate flexible working arrangements”, and flexibility requests would require consultation with workers.

These changes would also be supported by access to the Fair Work Commission.

Other recommendations included better Census data collection on work and care responsibilities; better pay for care workers; better rostering rights for employees; parental leave increased to 26 weeks; and better funding for First Nations early childhood education and care.