In any case, it should surely be up to individual companies to decide what works best for them and their employees, not the Government with its overly simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach to almost any complaint.
It would, for instance, be hard to imagine a newspaper such as this one functioning at all if there was a universal right to switch off imposed on it.
A disastrous pile-up occurs on the M25, but news of it would have to wait for another day for fear of being hauled before an employment tribunal for infringing the responsible reporter’s leisure time.
But it is not just the 24-hour news agenda that would be rendered inoperable. Virtually every business I can think of, with deadlines approaching and important clients demanding attention, requires flexibility from its workforce to function effectively. Firms that say “no can do” because our workers are on their break would soon find themselves out of business.
It may be that I’ve missed something, but as far as I can see there is no compelling empirical evidence for thinking that the right to work from home or to switch off while out-of-hours actually improves productivity.
This is not to argue that there are no such cases: in a number of well-publicised examples, companies have managed to move to a four-day week without unduly harming output or cutting pay.
Yet in the commercial sector, they are relatively unusual, and in any case, it should surely be up to the employer to decide what business model best suits the company’s purpose. If it yields a competitive advantage by, say, attracting top talent, then it may be worth doing. What works for some employers won’t for others. Blanket solutions nearly always backfire.
To grant such working practices as of right, moreover, establishes a form of employment apartheid between jobs where they may be just about manageable, and those where workplace “presenteeism” is an absolute necessity, such as mass manufacturing, distribution and construction.
Enshrining into law the segregation of workers into a caste system of protected higher earners and an underclass of shift and part-time workers for whom such protections are of no practical value could scarcely be more distasteful.
Many of Labour’s ideas for enhanced worker protections come from the Continent, where a number of countries have already adopted a similar approach to issues of work/life balance. The European Commission is meanwhile drafting overarching proposals on the right to switch off which would apply to the whole of the EU.
So much for Brexit – at this rate we might as well have stayed in. If we are ever to gain any advantage from being out, it would surely be wiser to allow the market to determine how companies arrange their affairs, and not vote-seeking politicians.
It’s true that productivity is higher in France, the spiritual home of leisure-focused worker protections, but so too is unemployment, this for the obvious reason that companies are loath to burden themselves with employees they cannot sack or even – if it gets in the way of the long weekend or lunch break – ask to work. Fewer workers equals higher productivity, but also a mountainous bill for welfare.
Other than discouraging job creation, it is hard to think of any reason that productivity would rise nationally because of Labour’s workers’ rights revolution.
Of all the possible explanations for Britain’s poor productivity record, burnout among overstressed employees called at the weekend to deal with the pressing needs of clients is about the least likely.
Those who have stuck with home-working since the pandemic tend invariably to answer when asked that it has immensely improved their productivity, citing time saved on commuting, better work/life balance, fewer distractions and less time wasted on office politics.
And yet it is on this implausible claim that the entire policy is justified. If it were true, you would expect the growth in home and hybrid working to show up in the national productivity data. Sadly, it has not.
There has been little or no recorded improvement in output per worker since working from home became a thing, nevermind that it has laid waste to many town centres, rendered large parts of the railways largely redundant and denied many younger workers the training they would normally get from “presenteeism”.
The big problem with the UK economy is not too little leisure but – with more than a quarter of the working-age population not working at all – too much.
Downing Street might more usefully focus its attention on this nationally shaming condition than on job-destructive gimmicks that in practice will be of virtually no value to anyone outside the public sector.
mong the many bad ideas that Labour has busied itself implementing since entering office six weeks ago is the right to work from home and/or “switch off” from work-related calls and emails when out of hours.
Nobody can say they weren’t warned that this is what the new Government would do. Labour’s “new deal for working people” was in the manifesto for all to see, even if some seemed naively to believe that the party would in practice be persuaded against anything quite so stupid.
Voters and lobby groups are already starting to think Rishi Sunak’s ill-fated government didn’t look so bad after all compared to what we have today. It’s too late now.
All the same, it was reasonable to assume that the right to switch off would at least have been subjected to some kind of consultation before implementation, so as to ascertain the various pros and cons.
No such luck.
The right to switch off is part of a raft of policies that Labour intends to implement in its first 100 days and there appears to be nothing anyone can do about it. If there was ever a “Ming vase” strategy so as not to frighten the horses in the run-up to the election, it now lies shattered on the floor.
But what really sticks in the craw is the Government’s attempt to pass off the workplace measures as part of its plans for addressing the UK’s shamefully poor productivity record.
“A culture of presenteeism can be damaging to productivity,” a No 10 spokesman insisted this week, as if – absurdly – the right to be absent might actually increase the nation’s output.
Everyone knows the old truism that a happy and contented workforce makes for a more productive one. It is also the case that today’s “always on” work culture is a comparatively new thing.
Before the advent of the mobile phone, email and other forms of digital messaging, workers tended to be unavailable to their employers from the moment they knocked off until they went back to work the following day. The employee’s leisure time could not so easily be interrupted.
But you cannot turn the clock back on modernity and, provided today’s “always on” work ethic is operated sensitively with due regard for workload, I cannot for the life of me see that there is anything wrong with it.