Many of us will be familiar with the situation: you’re supposed to be working a nine-to-five job, but find yourself responding to emails, texts and phone calls long after the workday is supposed to have ended. In fact, so long as there’s always the chance of another email, WhatsApp message or Slack notification appearing just around the corner, it can feel as though you never really stop working. At any moment, precious ‘free time’ can readily become ‘remote work’.
In 2023, TUC analysis found that around 3.8 million UK workers clocked a total of £26bn worth of unpaid hours – averaging more than seven extra hours per person each week. While responding to out of-hours communication might not feel like work, it really is nothing more than unpaid labour. In a country like the UK, where stress, depression and anxiety are the leading causes of work-related illness, this is a serious issue. British employees already work some of the longest hours in Europe and enjoy fewer national holidays than their counterparts. Long working hours and an increased blurring of working and non-working time are damaging workers and the economy alike.
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This dissolution of boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘free time’ is why the Labour government’s pledge for a new ‘right to switch off’ – as part of its ‘New Deal for Working People’ – is so desperately needed. For far too long, workers’ rights in the UK have languished behind those enjoyed by their European neighbours, rolled back steadily by successive governments, the outdated products of an economy that has long since transformed.
In this context, giving workers a new capacity to say “no” to employers who try to squeeze out unpaid labour by contacting staff outside of their contracted hours should be a common sense update. After all, this is a digital world where workers are separated from bosses by only the touch of a button. Unsurprisingly, a ‘right to switch off’ is popular, with recent polling finding that over 50% of the UK public back the policy (and only 17% opposed).
The devil, however, will lie in the details. While the ‘right to switch off’ formed part of the Labour Party’s general election manifesto, and has been floated by government spokespeople in the months since, to date there has still been little detail on how the policy would work – and remained conspicuously absent from the recent King’s Speech. This ambiguity is significant, as not every ‘right to switch off’ is created equal.
Our recent briefing for the Autonomy Institute reflected this where, having examined examples of the policy in a number of countries worldwide, we charted the different paths that a new UK right to switch off might take. On the one hand, a ‘soft’ version of the policy could amend existing employment legislation to give workers the right to ignore out-of-hours communication, without fear of penalisation. An even ‘softer’ version might see no legal grounding for a right to switch off altogether, instead simply suggesting that bosses leave workers alone during unpaid hours as an update to the UK Government’s ‘code of practice’ for businesses.