Australia

Eh, I think strictly codifying a law that basically exists but is potentially vague can be a good thing. This makes it absolutely undeniable that you have the right to disconnect from work, where previously you’d have to kind of work it out and employers might try to argue exceptions.

It’s like minimum passing laws for cyclists. A car going past a cyclist at 90 cm is obviously dangerous and irresponsible driving and any reasonable person would say it’s a chargeable offence for that reason. But in practice it very rarely got prosecuted, and even when it was it didn’t always succeed, because motornormative society defaults to saying the cyclist must be wrong. With a hard and fast rule that passing at less than 1 metre breaks the law, nobody can quibble about subjective matters like whether it’s dangerous or reckless.

To a degree the right to disconnect is like working from home, those policies affect white collar far more than blue collar, or min wage service workers, etc.

So in my mind it makes sense that, that reform went through without much issue. Everybody is on the side of the middle clas white collar worker it seems.

Its noticeable how much media time work from home has got since COVID over just about every other issue impacting workers. Maybe its because journalists identify more with it, maybe other classes of workers haven't the power to effect change, and influence national conversations.