Home office work
The new law applies to any businesses with more than 15 employees. Pixabay

Under the right to disconnect laws, millions of employees in Australia can now say no to being available after they switch off from work, though it does not prevent bosses from contacting them.

Starting Monday, employees in Australia can refuse to accept work-related calls or emails, unless their refusal is "unreasonable." However, what constitutes "unreasonable" is not clear.

The new law applies to any businesses with more than 15 employees; employees at small businesses will have to wait till Aug. 22, 2025 to have access to this right, reported ABC News.

However, there is not much clarity on how this would be implemented. The first stage of the conflict includes the bosses and the employees at work.

Brent Ferguson, head of national workplace relations policy for employer body Ai Group, wasn't too optimistic about the new law.

"This isn't a prohibition on an employer contacting or attempting to contact an employee," he said. "It's a new right for an employee to refuse that contact, to refuse to monitor their emails, or to refuse to take a telephone call from their employer, if it's outside of their working hours."

According to academic Gabrielle Golding, the COVID-19 pandemic promoted easy access to the employees as they worked from home. Post COVID, the digital access set a default system by which employees were expected to be available anytime. She called it the "availability creep."

"During that time when we were, by and large, forced to work from home, we were kind of training ourselves to be constantly available within our homes and elsewhere outside of the workplace," Golding said.

The new law should give confidence to the employees to resist the invasion of their personal life, John Hopkins, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, pointed out, according to Reuters.

"Before we had digital technology there was no encroachment, people would go home at the end of a shift and there would be no contact until they returned the following day," Hopkins said. "Now, globally it's the norm to have emails, SMS, phone calls outside those hours, even when on holiday."

A survey held last year by the Australia Institute found that Australians put in 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, which estimated the monetary value of the labor at AU$130 billion.

Australia's industrial umpire, the Fair Work Commission (FWC), will have the authority to determine whether the refusal by the employee is reasonable or not. The FWC has the power to issue a cease and desist order, and non-compliance will fetch a fine of up to AU$19,000 for an employee or up to A$94,000 for a company.

It will have to consider an employee's role, personal circumstances and how and why the contact was made.

Welcoming the new law, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Michele O'Neil said the caveat will prevent workers falling prey to poor policies.

"It's so easy to make contact, common sense doesn't get applied anymore," she said. "We think this will cause bosses to pause and think about whether they really need to send that text or that email.