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No, France Did Not Ban Workers From Answering Emails After 6 P.M.
Slate:The widely reported rumors that France decided to ban employees from answering work emails after 6 p.m. are just that—rumors.
The flurry of misreporting and outrage over French labor practices began with an article published Wednesday in the Guardian. “Employers' federations and unions have signed a new, legally binding labour agreement that will require staff to switch off their phones after 6 p.m.,” it stated. “Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors … employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones—or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita.”
In actuality, this was a gross exaggeration—and it seems like the real details quite literally got lost in translation. The deal cited by the Guardian is not a formal law, nor did it affect a million employees. It did not even specify a time at which employees need to cease exchanging work emails. According to our colleagues at Slate.fr, the Guardian writer “seemed to have trouble distinguishing between French and Italian.”
...snip...
This “obligation to disconnect,” a vague-sounding phrase if we’ve ever heard one, would apply not to the 1 million people the companies involved represent, but to the roughly 25 percent of independent workers they employ. Unlike typical workers, these “forfait jour” contractors have flexible hours and are not governed by the 35-hour workweek or 10-hour-day limit. So, unlike other workers, they can end up putting in extremely long days. They are not, as the Guardian piece angrily suggests, “sipping sancerre and contemplating at least the second half of a cinq à sept” before clocking out.
The flurry of misreporting and outrage over French labor practices began with an article published Wednesday in the Guardian. “Employers' federations and unions have signed a new, legally binding labour agreement that will require staff to switch off their phones after 6 p.m.,” it stated. “Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors … employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones—or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita.”
In actuality, this was a gross exaggeration—and it seems like the real details quite literally got lost in translation. The deal cited by the Guardian is not a formal law, nor did it affect a million employees. It did not even specify a time at which employees need to cease exchanging work emails. According to our colleagues at Slate.fr, the Guardian writer “seemed to have trouble distinguishing between French and Italian.”
...snip...
This “obligation to disconnect,” a vague-sounding phrase if we’ve ever heard one, would apply not to the 1 million people the companies involved represent, but to the roughly 25 percent of independent workers they employ. Unlike typical workers, these “forfait jour” contractors have flexible hours and are not governed by the 35-hour workweek or 10-hour-day limit. So, unlike other workers, they can end up putting in extremely long days. They are not, as the Guardian piece angrily suggests, “sipping sancerre and contemplating at least the second half of a cinq à sept” before clocking out.