Canadian billionaire businessman Kevin O'Leary, and star of U.S. television show Shark Tank, has criticised Australia’s “right to disconnect” laws that just came into effect this week.
The new laws threaten to fine employers who contact employees outside of work hours except in exceptional circumstances. Yet the extent to which such laws can be used by workers is also limited by the nature of their current employment contract—which often have clauses that allow after hours contact.
O'Leary was heavily critical of the government implementing such restrictions on businesses.
“What happens if you have an event in an office and it’s closed, or you have an emergency somewhere and you have to get a hold of them at two in the morning because it affects the job they’re working on and their mandate within the organisation,” he told Fox News.
“This kind of stuff just makes me crazy, it’s so dumb.
“Why would anybody propose such a stupid idea?” he added.
“If someone tells me they’re in ’silent mode,‘ they’re fired,” O’Leary said.
The right-to-disconnect laws have spread through Europe at a government level since being pioneered in France in 2017.
They have been legislated in Belgium, Spain, and Italy and are at a discussion level in much of the developed world—including in O'Leary’s native Canada.
Proponents say the rules are a necessary improvement for an increasingly digital age, while opponents argue they are impractical and that there is no need to be barred from contacting staff if necessary.
Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has argued for the right to disconnect, saying the process of always being available was unhealthy and affecting workers, especially younger people.
“Cognitive and emotional overload from hyper-connectivity has been noted to have negative effects. This includes a sense of fatigue due to the psychosocial risk of being constantly connected,” government documents state.
“This can have both physical and mental health effects.”
Some German companies, irrespective of a lack of government legislation, have taken their own approach to prevent employee burn-out.
They include daily assessments to ensure staff are not overworked, paying staff who are on-call, giving adequate notice of being on-call and ensuring 11 hours exist in the day where workers cannot be contacted by employers.
Large companies like Bosch and Volkswagen had already introduced right-to-disconnect rules within their own workplaces in 2014.
In Australia, Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the right to disconnect needed to become a conversation in workplaces so that employers and employees could decide on what was appropriate for them.
“We encourage workplace participants to educate themselves on the right to disconnect and take a commonsense approach to applying it within their workplace,” she said in a statement.
Yet much of these discussions already occur in large corporations in Australia, according to opposition workplace spokesperson Michaelia Cash during debate for the laws.
