Australia put into force a new “right to disconnect” law on Monday, empowering millions of workers to reclaim their time off and reasonably refuse to be contacted by their employers outside of work hours.
The regulation, passed back in February, now covers all companies with more than 15 employees, public broadcaster ABC reports. Employees at smaller businesses will have to wait until 22 August 2025 to be covered by the law. Under the right to disconnect, employees will have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours – including calls and emails – provided that refusal is considered “not unreasonable.”
Experts see the new law as an important step toward reinstating boundaries that blurred during the pandemic when many were required to work from home. Gabrielle Goulding, a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, told ABC that “If we have some sort of a guard rail in place like this,” it will change patterns and give employees “an opportunity to take some of their private life back.”
[See more: New research reveals key risks of digital work]
The new law does not mean that bosses can’t try to contact staff; it means that staff might not have to answer. Employees now have the right to refuse contact, to refuse to monitor their email and to refuse phone calls if they occur outside of paid working hours – with one important caveat. Employees can only do so if their refusal is “not unreasonable.”
What “not unreasonable” means isn’t likely to be answered any time soon. The Fair Work Commission (FWC) is required to provide guidelines under the new law but has so far declined to do so, instead asserting it would be better to issue the guidelines after it has dealt with a few cases. Presently the FWC can issue fines of up to AUS$19,000 (US$12,865) for managers or AUS$94,000 for companies found guilty of needlessly contacting employees outside work hours.
Kathryn van der Merwe, an HR executive at Australian telecommunications giant Telstra which instituted its own policies years ago, told ABC that setting boundaries within a company “comes down to behaviours and work practices.” Individual teams can come up with agreed upon norms, for example, and utilise tools such as scheduling emails for working hours or including a person’s working days and hours in their email signature to reinforce those norms.
