Gen Z aren't lazy - they just don't want to be on call 24/7

Like flexible working, TikTok and the Gen Z slang “FRFR”, the right to switch off – an idea proposed by Labour before the election as part of its reform of workers’ rights, and now set to become law – is a Rorschach test.

- MATT POTTER

Your instinctive position on Labour’s new employment law promising workers the right to disconnect probably says more about who you are, attitudinally, socially and generationally, than about anything in the legislation itself.

At present, employees have no official right to disconnect from work. If a boss wants to bother you outside of your mandated hours with a phone call or an email, they can. They can also agitate that you reply, too – and even demand you do extra work. But a new law ensuring that our homes don’t become 24/7 offices is hardly the atom bomb for business that has been suggested.

Not only is similar legislation already in operation in Ireland, Belgium and Australia, among others, it is simply the rolling back of a land grab – unplanned, and even unintended – of your free time.

If you were already in work in the mid-2000s, when smartphones and unlimited home broadband packages arrived, the law simply resets your expectations to what they reasonably would have been. Hi, are you still at work? No, you’ve left for the day and are at home, at the gym, in the pub. Let’s pick this up tomorrow.

To the workforce of 2024, those sound like halcyon days. Now, it’s standard to be asked to “just quickly ping me” – or to be at home on Sunday and see a single word pop up on your phone: “For tomorrow. Thoughts?”