In France, you can potentially sue your boss for sending weekend work emails
That email you just sent your minion on this Friday morning? You just violated France’s new “right to disconnect” law. A new labor reform act that includes a “right to disconnect” amendment has been recently enacted in France, effectively banning companies of 50 or more employees from emailing workers outside business hours, the Huffington Post reported on Thursday. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC earlier this month. France has been increasingly under pressure to address the nation-wide issue of work-related burnout, where it had been recently revealed that 1 in 10 of the country’s workforce are at high risk of crashing and burning. While the amendment has been well received in France, it comes as the IMF urges Paris to loosen its labor laws further in a bit to stimulate the economy.