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The right to disconnect should be a fundamental right

Can it be that capitalist societies can actually balance profitability with empathy?

A family member was recently talking about how he was not expected to physically return to work before June next year. “How nice,” I cheered. “You can travel. Work from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection.”

“Not really,” he countered, ruefully. “For some reason, working from home has now become corporate-speak for ‘available anytime, all the time’.”

The conversation is an all-too-familiar exchange in the post-Covid era. From sleep deprivation to severe back pain and even blurred vision, exhausted employees the world over are reporting the side-effects of being constantly ‘switched on’. So much so that the matter has even reached parliament in one part of the world.

Last week, European Union lawmakers voted in favour of a “right to disconnect” from the Internet and email. According to the resolution, legislators argued that disconnecting from work should be a “fundamental right” and lobbied the European Commission to chart out a framework allowing people to take time out from the pressure of working from home. Can it be that capitalist societies can actually balance profitability with empathy? Europe certainly seems to be inching in that direction — and I can only imagine it would be a very welcome move.

It’s true that we’ve come a long way since the era of sacrosanct weekends and radio silence from the office once you clocked out. Somewhere along the way, however, the modern professional overshot his own evolution. Today, the ideal worker is not necessarily the one who excels at his role — but one who puts work above all else. Feeling ill? Report for duty anyway. Got an important personal engagement? Go fashionably late (or not at all) — but bear in mind that deadlines wait for no man.

Despite numerous studies expounding the futility of trying to extract productivity out of a beleaguered workforce beyond a certain number of hours, and experts warning that unrested, miserable employees are hardly effective in achieving long-term company aims, organisations continue to demand unreserved commitment from workers. The unspoken caveat is that any resistance would bode very ill for one’s career.

In the wake of the pandemic, a related aspect has come to light — what economist Emily Oster last year called ‘secret parenting’. Whereas in pre-Covid times, employees would routinely pretend not to have personal lives for fear of derailing growth prospects at work, the pandemic exposed the world to toddlers interrupting conference calls and normalised team members promising to revert as soon as they’ve put their kids to bed.

If anything, it has made amply clear that the world is powered by humans, not bots. And that work — while very important — is not all that life’s about. That it’s unfair to measure employees’ worth in man hours alone. And that as the working world continues to evolve, we need policies to reflect ground realities too.

karen@khaleejtimes.com