Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers

I had my work GMail set to notify only between 0800 (so I could check for a "don't come in" message) and 1700 Mon-Fri. Of course, it didn't account for holidays / sick leave etc, but it was good at prevent me from panic checking every ping.

I wish that was a feature on modern Gmail. Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal. You can manually mute, but there's no way to silence specific notifications at specific times.

Regardless, employees shouldn't be expecting employees to be on-call without compensation. But users also need ways to manage this themselves.

Maybe if your company is filled with the type of people who run archlinux on their IBM era thinkpads, but otherwise I would be very surprised if could find even one or two sympathetic people who are also against installing a 2fa app. Even if you can get your manager to cave, it'll be less because they want to be "troublemakers" themselves, and more because they don't to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.

Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.

Someone with 3rd grade reading comprehension should be able to realize the comment about IBM era thinkpads were directed at your coworkers, not you. Then again, there was a recent OCED report about how around 7% of tertiary students have the literacy skills of a 10 year old, so that might explain why there are people who proudly proclaim they passed third grade, but nonetheless have worse comprehension.

>Maybe you're incapable of communicating with your coworkers about how your employer exploits you. I graduated third grade, so I'm not.

See my subsequent remark about "...they don't want to deal with the hassle of arguing with you.".

You can also perfectly use 2fa without a phone, unless your shitty company is using some shitty propietary 2fa, and even then, its just a "key" or "qr" they give you, that then you totally control and can use in mostly any 2fa compatible app, like Passwords. app from apple, 1Password, or Authy (RIP)

Installing shitty apps just cause your company tells you to is a great way to get your personal phone hacked too

Sames goes with all the MITM bullshit, If you want to install malware on my 6k macbook, you've gonna have to buy me your own "work macbook" for me to handle that shit. And i wont touch it for anything else than work. But installing spyware from work in my personal computer is a big NO NO.

Only if they're using RFC 6238 TOTP, and not some weird 2fa app. It's ironic you mention authy because they have their own weird TOTP scheme, along with push notification based approval system.

But yeah, things can get messy depending on the specifics, but not installing random apps on your personal phone seems like a pretty reasonable line to make.

I only mentioned Authy cause it was my go-to for 2fa before they got acquired

If they want me to have some "special device", they pay for the hardware for me to have said "special device".

My private phone is not for their use, ever.

There's a cost for everything and while you can "devolve" the cost downwards of a phone to an employee it's probably correct (in capitalism perspective) for an employer to pay for any tool they require so that the input costs are correctly correlated to the output price.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689859

[1] https://duo.com/

No, but it's also not reasonable for them to only offer something that can't be used with other software. Use a different 2FA scheme

that means they need to provide it

If its the terrible MS authenticator or DUO, then get me a device.

My employer has a BYOD program with a monthly stipend that is somewhat more than my phone provider (Fi) charges for an extra line. I think doing this with a non-flagship phone would probably pay for itself in a year or two.

So I do have work stuff on my personal phone, but with no notifications whatsoever. Only works because I'm in a position where it's acceptable to require all communications to go through emails or messaging apps though.

Im with GP, absolutely no work stuff on my personal phone

For example, if Apple can verify the device was purchased by a corporate entity and then enrolled in an mobile device management system, it will allow a lot of things that it won't allow on a personal device - things that can be used for monitoring.

Like what for example? They can’t access any chat messages or app data. Even your location is impossible to obtain without your knowledge.

You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.

Personally, I was very lucky. I recognize it was almost all luck. Born at the right place to the right people. Opportunities I was lucky to have because of that. Winning when gambling on relationships, professional work, and in the capital markets. I advocate for unlucky people whenever possible, because humans who did not choose to be here should not suffer due to their poor luck.

“We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” —- Maurice Allais

Laws like this will just encourage workarounds (like moving work to jurisdictions where such laws don't exist) and, eventually and wherever possible, elimination of positions (AI).

It does actually work - think of it like a speed limit. If everyone is forced to go at a certain maximum speed (ie. the same max no. of contact hours per week per employee) then it’s not a (relative) loss if a business can’t operate at “full capacity” for more hours than its competitors.

Executive/virtual assistants, travel coordinators, bookkeepers, cold callers, real estate transaction coordinators, social media marketing managers, medical transcriptionists and billers, customer service reps, medical records analysis, architectural drafting, video editors, etc.

Many Americans used to be able to earn decent wages working in these roles. Now, it's much harder and there's much less opportunity. A ton of these roles are now filled by freelancers/contractors in places like the Philippines.

Obviously, this didn't happen just because of US labor laws. Wages are the big driver. But laws like this do in some cases give businesses reason to look at places where wages are lower and employees are more "flexible".

It's easy for tech people who feel secure in 6-figure/year jobs to scoff at this but go and talk to someone who used to work in these types of roles how life has been over the past decade.

I've had two phone for basically all my working life and just don't look at it outside of work hours. Don't think I've ever been challenged on why are you not reading after hour messages. Everyone around me is professional enough to know that its a discussion that would go poorly.

Slack also works on weekends and at the AM

I vaguely remember a few years ago there was some news pushing new scheduling software that was supposed to help make schedules more predictable, and how it wasn't working to full potential because store managers wouldn't trust it.

But I don't think the bill in question here would actually do anything to affect that issue?

It could also be a personality thing or a worldview thing.

Some people just have a hard time saying "no" in general, or are constantly looking for reasons to jump at shadows.

Or there's people teaching that the world runs on class warfare and anyone with any amount of power is always looking for an excuse to abuse that power.

I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.

In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.

There are some true scumbags out there.

Usually about covering shifts.

Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business.

Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.

It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.

I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.

More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.

This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.

I've been fortunate to have a very limited amount of on-call events. At one place for 3.5 years there was 1 event. In another place there's been 2 in the last 9 months but on the bright side these events are taken seriously in the sense that dev time is immediately prioritized to hopefully prevent them from happening in the future.

All code being written gets reviewed by someone and there's an expectation tests are included. Of course that doesn't prevent all bugs, but there's an attempt at quality control by the teams producing the code.

I think part of this role (SRE / platform / DevOps / whatever you want to classify this as) is technical implementation but also coming up with systems and workflows to reduce downtime and risk when performing deployments. Not all management is open to change but IMO it should be brought up and taken seriously. There are companies out there who care about both providing value to customers while also keeping team morale high.

IME, very few companies care they are screwing up their employees' lives. It's why these laws are good since it puts financial cost on them and gives their employees cover.

I would think it would already be expensive to make someone paid by the hour do extra work stuff during time they're not already being paid for.

Only question, is this good for employees, and bad for employers, or the other way around? Creating new ways folks can "get ahead" that is non-obvious (or worse non-official) can lead to issues.

It’s not preventing “can anyone cover Saturday” messages in a group chat. Just the case where shift changes are made and workers are _required_ to work outside their contracted hours. Seems this would fit with what good food service employers do, would put pressure on the more abusive fast food chains. Maybe the flexible shift is more important than I credit though?

Unless I’m missing something it would ban the standard startup model for oncall, meaning Michigan would be made (even more) unattractive for tech startups. Unless we just re-comp everyone to include an SRE stipend as part of the contracted salary package? Unsure if that could work, maybe? SWE is typically well over minimum wage so maybe this just nets out the same?

Are you “compensated for being oncall” if your contract says you may do some unspecified amount of oncall, and your pay doesn’t change if you do or don’t?

You could imagine a judge / regulator deciding either way right?

Bills like this would help a lot of people who are victims of "can you just take a look at this real quick" at 6pm. It does need to be at the country level though, otherwise employers will just play off states against each other.

The article isn't clear how exactly this is intended to work. I think no surprise hours that aren't recognized in the terms of employment makes sense. But also I think I should be able to agree to being available if I am willing to be. Remote Michigan tech workers already have enough trouble as tech companies insist on returning to office.

If you have to “clock in” at the exact same time every day, “clock out” at the exact same time every day, and are expected to work additional scheduled hours outside of work, you should be paid hourly and receive overtime. You are an hourly employee. Not a salary one. You might be called a salary employee. But no, you’re working as an hourly employee.

If companies expect you to be on call, that’s great. Pay an on call hourly rate. Problem solved. But you can’t just take a salary employee, treat them like they work at McDonald’s and then pay a base bi weekly salary. That’s not okay IMO.

It was ALWAYS a way to get massive unpaid overtime extracted upon threat of firing. And overtime for workers was inexcusable, no matter what. Got a rush? Too fucking bad, clock out.

These days professionally, I agreed to 40h/week. That's what they get. If there's a real outage or un-manufactured crisis, then I'll stick around. But its comp time for the week.

I don't work for free for capitalists. If they want more labor, they can pay for more.

What's your opinion on [cuck licensing](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708655)?

I'm staunchly for AGPL3, and harsh and strong enforcement actions against violators. You know, what the companies would do to us. Tit for tat.

Which is basically the situation you get from [A]GPL. You still have the option to offer a different license in exchange for money.

Stops tivo-ization. And stops app-ification (making a GPL3 into a webapp and significant changes, but not sharing as well).

But most of the FLOSS orgs (FSF, etc) don't want blood from violator companies. Instead they just want mealy-mouth halfassed responses that amount to 'open the source'.

I remember what happened to copyright violators who copied Metallica and Britnry Spears back in the early 2000's. Fucking kids got hit with $4000 settlements or $135000 lawsuits.

That's the type of vigor and destructiveness I want FLOSS orgs to go after for-profit copyright violators.

To your point about government needing to backstop working conditions, the minimum wage in Indiana is 7 dollars an hour, and yet I can get a job paying 18 dollars an hour at Taco Bell. Why do you imagine that to be the case if employers have so much bargaining power?

There is something I call the restaurant quality economy measure, a tracking method of how the economy is doing. If you go into a place like Taco Bell, or some otherwise middling restaurant and the service is really bad, and take this as a trend over a lot of eateries then is very likely you live in good economic times. Now switch that, if the average crappy place you go into has really good service then that's a good sign things have gone wrong.

Quality workers have moved down the economic ladder of employment. These people would gladly be doing something that paid more and had more prestige, but that employment doesn't exist.

What does that have to do with your statement. It's when the economy goes really bad employees realize they are in the position of power. It's this pretty much this way right now in most computing related employment, most companies have tightened down and invested more in AI than people. This means your workers will put up with a lot more bullshit in order to not be fired. And when the economy is doing bad all over, that's when the employers break out the abusive bullshit because they can? Are you going to go get a different job?

Be glad the law exists then.

So no, to hell with that paternalism.