Now we see the consequences of not reading the small print. Tucked away in plain sight in the Labour manifesto was a New Deal for Working People. And what nobody bothered to read was the bit that guaranteed that employees would have the right to ask for flexible working from day one and that employers would have to have a very good excuse to say no.
And now the other bit is sinking in. Angela Rayner, that busy bee, is drafting up measures to ensure that employees have the “right to switch off” out of hours. So employers who have the sheer bad taste to contact their workers outside working hours, including holidays, could find themselves on the wrong end of an employment tribunal.
The advent of smartphones has meant that the divide between work and not-work has been eroded
Naturally, there are many of us who manage to switch off during the actual working day if we have to sit through a meeting which is not as compelling as we hoped. But this is serious stuff potentially. Employers will have to think carefully before they contact staff after closing time. Presumably emergencies don’t count but what’s an emergency?
No civilised person would call a colleague on holiday on a work matter unless it were really necessary; indeed in the old days it was bad form to call someone during lunch. But sometimes needs must when there’s a crisis. And what is not going to encourage businesses to take on staff is if they are worried that they’ll never see them in the workplace because the new employee will quite legally ask for the WFH option from the off, and now may well kick up if he or she gets a call out of hours.
The perverse thing is that apparently lots of people already work on holiday; according to a survey from NatWest Premier, over four in 10 do (really?) rising to a third of those on £100,000 or more a year. What I want to know is how many of them are working in the public sector; in the civil service, it’s rather a treat for a minister to see a full office.
The advent of smartphones has meant that the divide between work and not-work has been eroded — there are grim WhatsApp groups where colleagues exchange ideas out of hours and which never switch off — but the answer isn’t to legislate for Do Not Disturb on holidays; it’s to reinstate social norms. This sends a really terrible message to a business thinking of taking on staff: AI and robots are less trouble than people.
