Ontario’s right to disconnect law is too vague to be of much help, experts say

Lise Jasmin enjoys the flexibility of her job as a community health nurse in Ottawa, but the mix of home and office work and varied schedules make it difficult to fully disconnect when she’s not around. time.

There is little clarity on what to do, for example, if a colleague working a later shift has a question, or if he is expected to respond if someone emails him at 10 p.m. .

Jasmin is eager to see how her workplace’s new policy on disconnecting from work — now required by law starting this month for all Ontario employers with 25 or more employees — will address those gray areas.

“It’s a lot of troubled waters sometimes,” Jasmin said. “Having the policy in place will hopefully clear up some of that.”

Affected employers were required to have written policies in place by June 2. They then have an additional 30 days to provide them to staff, so many workers like Jasmin are still waiting to see how they state their expectations.

The new law has created a buzz about its potential to give people peace of mind to disconnect from digital communications at the end of the workday. But experts and stakeholders say it’s too vague to really move the needle on work-life balance, especially in the age of hybrid working.

Toronto labor lawyer Deborah Hudson said work-life balance issues are important to address as hybrid work becomes a permanent feature of many workers’ lives two years after the pandemic has upended traditional norms.

But she said the Ontario law missed an opportunity to have real impact because it doesn’t say what employers’ policies should contain.

“The spirit and the idea, I think, are fantastic. It’s just, what does that actually mean?” Hudson said.

Business owners had the same question before the June 2 deadline.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business conducted a survey that found that 33% of small businesses with 25 or more employees said they didn’t know they had to have a disconnect policy in place by then. Only 16% of companies said they had a policy in place before the deadline.

Julie Kwiecinski, CFIB’s director of provincial affairs, said she’s heard from many confused businesses saying they want to comply with the law, but haven’t been given clear guidance on how to do so.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword, because on the one hand you like flexibility because you’re not paralyzed,” she said.

“But on the other hand, it puts a company in a really precarious position, because then they wonder, what do you have to put in this policy that will pass with an employment standards officer if they cross the door and asked to see him?

The Department of Labor said it did not have data on the number of eligible employers who had prepared policies because they were not required to file them.

Employers who fail to implement a policy could be fined, but the department takes an “educational approach”.

The ministry said it has communicated information about the policy through emails, newsletters and on the government website, and is planning more educational webinars.

Monte McNaughton, who introduced the bill as Labor Minister, said in an interview that introducing a policy is in the best interest of the employer.

“If you want to attract and retain talent – because that’s a big challenge we have here in Ontario – you have to step up and have those policies and recognize that when people are done at the end of the day, they have to be away from the clock and spending time with their families,” he said.

The Employment Standards Act – and therefore the right to disconnect policy requirement – does not apply to Crown employees, the department said. But McNaughton said just being more aware of the issue had made a difference in his own office.

“As soon as we introduced the legislation, I noticed a big difference,” he said. “People, myself included, weren’t pressing send that email late at night or on weekends and saving it for Monday morning.”

McNaughton said he wanted to see the impacts of the law and that if “further action” needed to be taken, the government would act. It will continue to change labor laws, especially to keep up with technological change, he said.

John Gross, owner of a climbing gym in Toronto, said developing a policy was not difficult, and the process helped streamline operations by forcing careful consideration of areas where new recruits had called senior off-shift employees for help. .

“Having this policy in place entails a bit more training to make them a bit more self-sufficient, so they don’t need to rely on people for day-to-day tasks,” he said. “It helped us realize where we need to improve our process a bit.”

Other experts have pointed out what they see as the law’s drawbacks. David Doorey, professor of labor law at York University, said the government’s descriptions of the policy as a “right to disconnect” are misleading because the law does not create any new rights for people.

He noted that there are no consequences if employers ignore their own disconnection policies. It also doesn’t protect employees from penalties if they ignore 24-hour communications, which he says makes the law in its current form “fundamentally useless.”

“The best we can say about the law is that it may cause some employers to change the way they think about after-hours communications and that may be helpful for some workers,” Doorey said. .

Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Center for Future Work in Vancouver, said portraying it as a “right to disconnect” could be detrimental to workers and that joining a union would do more to protect people.

Digital technology is part of the blurring of work and life, Stanford said, as well as part of the “hyper-competitive” and precarious nature of many jobs, where there is an “implicit pressure” to work after-hours to retain contracts or be promoted.

“Without clear guidelines and clear protections for workers, this abuse of worker availability will get worse,” Stanford said.

— With files from Allison Jones