How new rules protect the 90 percent of workers being contacted by their employer after hours [Video]

Jane* was in labour when she received a call from work. Despite being on maternity leave and about to give birth, she answered.

“If you’ve got a day off and you get a phone call, you answer it. That’s the unspoken expectation,” she told 9news.com.au.

The calls and emails continued during her maternity leave in 2022, but if it happened today she’d have the legal right to ignore it.

From Monday, August 26, new ‘right to disconnect’ laws come into effect, protecting the rights of Australians who work for businesses with 15 or more employees to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact from employers – unless that refusal is unreasonable.

Jane says the new protections couldn’t come sooner, especially for “vulnerable workers who are sometimes at the mercy of their workplaces”.

Australians work an average of 5.4 hours a week unpaid over time, according to data from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, and almost 90 percent report being …