France: Employees must avoid work email after 6 pm
A new law says that if French workers happen to notice a phone call or email from the office over dinner, they simply have to look the other way.
About a million French workers in the digital and consulting industries will be required to switch off work phones and avoid email before 9 a.m. and after 6 p.m., barring “exceptional circumstances,” according to a BBC News article. The agreement reached by employers federations and unions also says employers cannot pressure their employees to flout the directive.
The European Union’s Working Time Directive requires European country except the United Kingdom and Malta to restrict the workweek to a 48-hour maximum. But the mobile and online technologies now common in the workplace have eroded the rule, as well as the even shorter 35-hour workweek France introduced in 1998
