You Can Refuse To Respond To Calls Or Emails From Your Boss After Work If This Bill Is Passed

In some work places, bosses bother their employees even after work hours.

Are you someone who is fed up of receiving WhatsApp texts and emails after you have worked 8 hours in the office? Well if the Right to Disconnect Bill is passed in the Parliament it could be good news for you as bosses won¡¯t be able to bother you after work hours.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Supriya Sule has been trying to get the Right To Disconnect Bill pass in the Lok Sabha which would enable employees to disconnect from telephone calls, emails and text messages related to work, after work hours and on holidays.

If the bill is passed, you'll be well within your rights to refuse to respond to work related calls or emails once the work day is over.

This is not the first time that Supriya Sule is trying to push this Bill forward. She first introduced it in November last year but like most private members Bills in Lok Sabha it was not considered and it lapsed at the end of the tenure of the previous House.

BCCL

But Sule seems to have no intention of letting it go. She has brought up the Bill again and is even seeking support from other party members.

The Bill proposes to ¡®establish the Employees¡¯ Welfare Authority, which will give employees right to disconnect. According to Sule, she has been receiving great support from people around the country and she has taken the responsibility to become their voice in Lok Sabha.

In a social media message Sule wrote, ¡®I started a private member¡¯s Bill in the previous Lok Sabha. I have decided to revive it¡¯.

The aim of the bill is to let the employees be free of digital distractions so that they can actually connect with people around them. The Bill proposes ¡®digital detox centres¡¯ and seeks to recognise a person¡¯s right to disconnect as a method to reduce stress by creating a clear line between an employee¡¯s professional and personal lives.

The previous draft of the Bill said, ¡®According to the report released by the World Economic Forum, the proportion of mobile workers who could work from any location is expected to rise beyond 70 per cent. While this has benefits in terms of work flexibility, it also carries significant risk of erosion of boundaries between professional and personal life.¡¯

Reuters

Sule started an online petition to push the Bill and by now it has received the support of over 1 lakh people.

Currently, only France has a legal provision that allows employees to disconnect from work-related emails after office hours.

France had in 2017, enacted a law that in effect made after-hours work emails illegal, allowing workers to exercise their ¡°right to disconnect.¡± Companies were encouraged to set blackout times after work during which an employee would not be responsible for responding to an email.