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Urgent culture is the name of our way of life in the age of the Internet and real-time communication. Everything is a priority and everything must happen immediately. There are passionate and urgent people who can’t live without checking their email every hour and without a phone in their hands.
Oh, next message!
“If anything happens, call me”: This is what they like to say goodbye to during the holidays. According to a survey by karriere.at, one in three Austrian employees is available for work at any time. An EU study found that four out of ten employees in Austria have contacted their employers during their free time.
This is by no means covered by the law. “Employees have the right to rest. Employers should develop clear representation solutions and barrier-free environments within the company so that they do not get in the way of their well-deserved rest time,” the Labour Chamber said.
Even “minimal” work is working time. “Employers are generally not allowed to contact employees who are on vacation or compensatory leave. If vacation is interrupted by business calls or emails, this time is considered working time and may not be deducted from the vacation account,” explains Maximilian Turrini, head of the labor and social law department of the AK Carinthia. Even if you have a work mobile phone, it does not mean that employees have to be contacted during their free time. You do not have to carry it with you on vacation or turn it on. “During vacation, turning off the work mobile phone is not only permissible, but often an essential requirement to achieve the recreational value required by law.” The ÖGB says: “No, I don’t have to answer. When my boss calls me in, I call in at leisure.”
Maximilian Turrini: “Employers are generally not allowed to contact employees who are on leave or compensatory leave.”
© Bauer/AK
If employees voluntarily read emails outside of working hours, it does not count as work time. “But as soon as you have to perform a service on behalf of the employer, whether it’s regularly checking your email inbox or deleting emails, you’ve done your job – and the time you have to do that is not vacation,” says Tourini. Tourini says anyone who receives a call from their employer while on vacation should keep careful records of this. Anyone who is asked to work during vacation must be paid for a full workday, even if they only work a few hours. However, the current state of the law is not enough for the labor chamber. She is calling for a law that clearly defines the right not to be contacted, an explicit right not to be contacted.
So far, the same is true of labor laws. But it won’t work without self-discipline. As an employee, you should strive to get rid of the feeling (desire?) of having to be available all the time so as not to miss anything.
An exception is the so-called on-call service, “On-call service may be arranged outside working hours for ten days a month. And it can only be agreed upon during the maximum two weeks of rest per month. If actual tasks occur during the duty period, both the travel time and the actual work performance are counted as working time,” explains lawyer AK.
Of course, on-call duty should not be considered a vacation.
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