From the 26th of August 2024, non-small business Australian workers were given the legal right to disconnect from their employers. This right will extend to those working in small businesses with less than 15 employees in August 2025. But what does the right to disconnect involve? And will it help university students juggling multiple priorities such as work and study?
What do the laws do?
The legal right to disconnect does not penalise employers from attempting to contact their employees outside of work hours. Instead, the new legal right will protect eligible workers who refuse to respond to work-related contact outside of working hours, except where their refusal is unreasonable.
While the Fair Work Commission encourages employees and employers to resolve disputes among themselves, the Commission can intervene to resolve any disputes that cannot be resolved privately. When deciding whether an employee’s refusal is unreasonable, the Commission takes several factors into account. These factors include the reason for the work-related contact, how this contact was attempted and whether the employee is paid to work outside of ordinary working hours.
A remedy for overworked student workers?
The right to disconnect comes at a time when seven in ten Australian workers have reported working outside of ordinary hours. As ‘working from home’ has become normalised in many post-lockdown contexts, this tendency to work overtime has been compounded by increasingly blurred distinctions between home and work settings.
While many Australian workers are doing unpaid overtime, many university students in Australia are also juggling full-time study with employment. For example, a survey of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand university students found that up to 86% of respondents work while studying.
For student workers having to deal with the pressure of answering after-hour work calls, there is hope that the new right to disconnect laws could protect worker wellbeing. Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, has praised the new right to disconnect laws for setting a legal standard for employers who expect employees to continue being available outside of working hours:
“Not all employers, but some employers have completely blurred or just crossed over those boundaries and are expecting people to be connected and answer their emails and look at their phones, 24/7… And that’s just not on.”
When hustle culture and precarity take over
The right to disconnect also has its critics. In addition to industry concerns that the new right to disconnect could hinder productivity, there are also concerns which relate directly to student workers’ experiences with hustle culture and financial precarity.
‘Hustle culture’ is a term which describes a workplace culture which promotes high levels of work. Hustle culture can easily become toxic in situations where employers reward workers who push themselves to their limits, or even punish those who refuse to work outside of agreed hours.
The legal right to disconnect is an attempt to address toxic manifestations of hustle culture in workplaces. But there are several reasons why student workers involved in hustle culture may not be able to fully engage with their right to disconnect.
Firstly, student workers may simply be insufficiently informed about their right to disconnect. According to a report published by Eurofound, only half of respondents working at companies with the right to disconnect were “aware of actions having been taken to implement it” in their workplaces. This finding points to the importance of employers being transparent with their employees about how the right to disconnect can be utilised in the workplace. And so, when you have a workplace in which hustle culture is the norm, it’s very possible for employers to dismiss the need to be transparent about employees’ right to disconnect.
A second reason student workers might not disconnect from work is fear of the social consequences. Just as workplace discourses about work-life balance can encourage fellow workers to find balance, hustle culture may make it socially desirable to work for extended overtime periods.
Even if some student workers may not care about the ‘social desirability’ of working overtime, the cost-of-living crisis means that some student workers feel they have no choice. ‘The precariat’, as coined by labour economist Guy Standing, is a social class of individuals who face the ongoing threat of insecurity and precarity. For out-of-home student workers, this insecurity may involve concerns about being unable to support themselves financially in the face of rising grocery, rent and study costs. For student workers who are also international students, this precarity may be compounded by the need to pay remittances to their families overseas, as well as paying for their own degree.
Student workers who are facing these financial strains are especially vulnerable to forgoing their own right to disconnect out of a fear of harming their job security. When your rent, access to food, family living situation or education depends on your job security, it’s no wonder why some student workers may not feel empowered to disconnect from their work, even when they’re not being compensated for it.
Employers should set an example
Toxic manifestations of hustle culture are not inevitable. If anything, employers can make all the difference to the culture of a workplace. They should use their power as an employer to ensure that workers, including students, are fully aware of their right to disconnect from their work.
In addition to fostering open dialogue within the workplace, employers can also set an example of disconnecting from work themselves – this may mean creating out-of-office replies or disabling after-hour notifications.
Of course, not all workplaces are the same, and some workers may be contractually obligated to make themselves available outside of ordinary hours. In this case, employers can offer more compensation for these workers, on the condition that they are not feeling pressured to work more than they are able to.
So how will the new right to disconnect affect working university students? Well, it ultimately comes down to how employers treat their workers. In the best of cases, employers will create a space in which student workers feel safe in their job to disconnect where appropriate. In the worst of cases, it’ll be Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada blowing up your phone as you try to catch up on some much-needed sleep.