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French companies will be required to guarantee a "right to disconnect" to their employees from Sunday as the country seeks to tackle the modern-day scourge of compulsive out-of-hours email checking. From January 1, a new employment law will enter into force that obliges organisations with more than 50 workers to start negotiations to define the rights of employees to ignore their smartphones.
Overuse of digital devices has been blamed for everything from burnout to sleeplessness as well as relationship problems, with many employees uncertain of when they can switch off. The French measure is intended to tackle the so-called "always-on" work culture that has led to a surge in usually unpaid overtime—while also giving employees flexibility to work from outside the office.
http://phys.org/news/2017-01-french-workers-disconnect.html
[Also Covered By]: The Guardian , Sky News
(Score: 4, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday January 03 2017, @01:38PM
It appears you have no clue what hard work is. To point to some extremes, in Germany forced labor was used to work humans to death. But also under more common circumstances, exhaustion due to work has severe live-shortening consequences. Stress can lead to sudden-death by e.g. heart-attacks, lack of sleep causes dementia [dailymail.co.uk], weight-gain [webmd.com] (also contributing to heart-attackt), and of course a whole lot of psychological problems (burnout, bad temper leading to relationship-problems, etc.), leading to significantly higher suicide-rates and car-accident-rates.
Lack of occupation can also lead to depressions, fatigue etc. with similar consequences. With current unemployment-rates and productivity increases, it should be possible to employ more people and reduce the working-hours per worker. If there are not enough qualified workers, the ones that do exist should have the power to dictate the terms of their employment and there is no reason for them to themselves being exploited. If there are more than enough qualified workers, there is no justification to overwork a few of them and keep the rest in unemployment. Since the workers seem to be insufficiently organized enforce their own protection, the state should very well step in.
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