Louisiana Should Adopt Australia's 'Disconnect Law' Where You Can Ignore the Boss

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a Louisiana law allowing you to ignore emails and phone calls from your boss when it’s after work? In Australia, they have just passed something called the “ Right to Disconnect ” law.

This new law, according to NPR , also applies to people at work. If the call or email is work-related, and not an immediate action item or emergency, the employee has the right not to pick up the phone or answer the email.

Doesn’t this sound heavenly? The new law that was passed would,

…..protect employees who “refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable.

Australia’s Fair Work Commission says this is how the system will work going forward after the passage of this new law.

Is This Law Going to Work in Australia?

Australia’s Chamber of Commerce is completely against the new law. They point out this is going to lead to confusion.  What happens when you disagree with your boss about the “immediate nature” of a call or email they think you should have answered?

You’ll have to take that up with the Fair Work Commission. This seems like it is a disaster waiting to happen with a backlog of complaints from both sides to the Fair Work Commission, but several other countries have already passed a similar law including Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France, just to share a few.

There was a bill before New York City officials in 2019 to pass a “Disconnect Law”, but it never happened:

You can click here for a map of the world showing which countries have “Disconnect Laws”.

Don’t Try Using the Disconnect Law in Louisiana

It’s not recommended that you try to explain to your boss that you didn’t answer their call or respond to their email because you “heard” a “Disconnect Law” was passed.

It’s tough going in Louisiana. We DO NOT have that type of law, and neither does any state in America.

In Louisiana, there is not much that workers are entitled to because of being an “ At-Will ” state in which to work. That means you can be fired for a reason or for no reason at all unless you have a contract for a period of time or you are a union member with a collective bargaining agreement.

You can’t be fired for federal law, and you can click here to see the reasons you CAN’T be fired in Louisiana.

Is Work-Life Balance a Myth?

Ha! When you type this phrase into Google there are thousands of articles that pop up about this topic. Most people try to have a balance between how much time they spend working (or thinking about work) and how much time they spend at home.

Psychology Today offers plenty of perspective about what works about this theory and what it doesn’t. They point out you have to be willing to rearrange the slices of your life to get things to work out.

The conventional way of thinking about work-life balance in binary terms presents a zero-sum game. Increasing time to spend with family means less time for managing one’s career. But if you don’t take care of your career, you will not be able to provide for your family.

The advice you can get by clicking here . Think of it differently. You can’t shape it as an “ all-or-nothing situation “.

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