Overview
- The private member's bill would give employees the legal right to ignore work calls, emails and messages outside official hours and on holidays without disciplinary action.
- It proposes an Employees’ Welfare Authority to confer the right, collect baseline data on after-hours digital use, and require firms with more than 10 workers to negotiate out-of-hours terms with staff or unions.
- Employees who agree to work beyond set hours would be entitled to overtime at the normal wage rate under negotiated terms.
- Non-compliant employers would face a financial sanction equal to 1% of total employee remuneration, and the plan includes counselling services and digital detox centres.
- Introduced as a private member's bill that rarely becomes law, the measure arrived alongside related proposals such as Shashi Tharoor’s bid to limit work hours and Kerala’s draft state bill on disconnecting from after-hours work.