Employment Law - Assessment Task

Question 2 – Discuss the legal issues in the following article.

Landmark deal provides "right to disconnect"

Tuesday, April 06, 2021, 3:57pm

Victorian police officers have won a ground-breaking "right to disconnect" clause in their enterprise deal that relieves them of a duty to respond to emails or telephone calls outside their effective working hours.

The agreement says (see clause 59 (Links to an external site.)) that supervisors and managers must respect officers' periods of leave and rest days.

It says that – other than in emergencies or genuine welfare matters – police between the rank of constable and senior sergeant and protective service officers must not be contacted outside working hours unless the employee is in receipt of an "availability allowance".

The allowance (Links to an external site.) is payable for each hour an officer is available, other than when they are rostered for work or expressly directed to be available.

For these officers, the availability allowance will be $7.15 an hour on non-rest days and $14.33 an hour on rest days, from July 1 this year.

More senior officers – superintendents, commanders and inspectors – already receive an annual contactability allowance (Links to an external site.).

Superintendents or commanders who are not directed to be available for work will not be required to work but must remain contactable, while inspectors who are required to resume work will receive an availability allowance.

The provisions relating to availability are found in agreement clauses 56, 57 and 58 (Links to an external site.).

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Deal protects officers against "availability creep": Union leader

Police Association of Victoria secretary Wayne Gatt told Workplace Express today that police work is defined by rolling shifts, like nursing and some other occupations, but it is harder to draw a line around policing.

Gatt, a serving sergeant with 26 years in the force, says medical evidence shows that a key driver of mental health injury among police is "hyper-vigilance", and clear plans are needed to help in their "decompression" from work.

He says that, in the early days of mobile telephone ownership, supervisors made conscious decisions to only contact off-duty officers in the "most extreme of circumstances".

But "availability creep" in recent years means people are increasingly willing to ring off-duty colleagues about the "smallest, insignificant matters" that can often wait until their next shift.

Gatt says there are times when out-of-hours contact is needed, such as shortly after shift handovers, when an availability allowance is paid, but it is important to help off-duty police to stop thinking about work, to relax and focus on their families.

"It's effectively putting the onus on the employer," he says.

"It's not to say that 'just turn your phone off', if you don't want to receive calls.

"It says, 'consider the need to ring, consider the need to make contact'."

Gatt cites a 2015 Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report (Links to an external site.) on sex discrimination and harassment in Victoria Police, which provides a gender equity analysis of the force's 2011 enterprise agreement.

He says one of the drivers of discrimination is a strong perception that policing work should be full-time.

The new rules on off-duty contact, Gatt says, will promote workplace inclusion and diversity.

The new agreement puts some "hard lines" around being contacted after-hours and will help to balance police work with parental and caring responsibilities.

"So, it has a gender and carer lens as well," Gatt says.

Disconnection right developing in Europe

France introduced "right to disconnect" laws in 2016.

The Irish Government this year asked its Workplace Relations Commission to develop a code of practice to help employees to disengage outside normal working hours, while the ACTU last year released a working from home charter that includes a right to disconnect.

Note: This article initially reported the Victoria Police agreement as "newly approved" on the mistaken understanding that it had been approved only weeks earlier. However, it had won approval 12 months earlier.

(source:  workplace express)

(20 marks)