France Makes Sending Work Emails After 6 p.m. a Serious Faux Pas
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It’s tough to maintain any kind of work-life balance when your boss is blowing up your smartphone with urgent emails at 8 p.m., and you're out with friends. Although you might wonder if your boss is Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, complaining about those emails can make it seem like you’ve caught an epic case of #WhiteCollarWhine or gone down the #FirstWorldProblems rabbit hole.
The solution? Move to France.
Employers' federations and workers’ unions in the land of croissants and the Mona Lisa have created legally binding agreements that prohibit managers from sending employees emails after 6 p.m. or pressuring them to reply after-hours. The newest rules about email—a boss can’t send an employee one before 9 a.m. either—are designed to push back against the intrusion of work into personal time. The ban will even affect the French offices of the biggest tech companies in the world, Google and Facebook, places that aren’t exactly known for an unplugged-from-work culture.
Could such a ban come to American shores? It’s not likely. In France, downtime is a sacred cultural trust; a French law passed in 1998 limits the workweek to an enviable 35 hours. That leaves plenty of free time for the French to relax.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, we’re saddled with a little thing called the Protestant work ethic, and our once powerful unions don't have the kind of clout the French ones have. We can't even get the minimum wage raised without the nation having a complete meltdown. Employers aren't shy about letting workers know, given the stacks of résumés on their desks, that if you don't want to work all hours of the day, someone else will. All that creates a workplace culture that's more interested in laboring long hours in pursuit of putting food on the table than in a little joie de vivre.
That said, we can never say never. According to a career survey from the National Society of High School Scholars, one of the top perks Millennials are looking for in an employer is work-life balance. As more young people become the bosses and lawmakers of the future, let's hope they just say no to the long hours most of us are used to.