CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: The Right to Be Unreachable

MAN: A national labour review is now examining whether workers should be given a legal right to ignore work messages once their paid hours are over, and the proposal has drawn responses from unions, employers, and researchers. Yusuf Ansari, who advises three unions on workplace policy, backs the change and argues that its justification has nothing to do with whether late-night replies help a company's output. He says his support would not change even if evening responses were shown to raise productivity, because the real issue is whether a worker's personal time belongs to that worker or can be claimed by an employer without pay. Marguerite Lefebvre, who runs a freight company in Marchwood with about fifty drivers and dispatchers, says she shares that principle and has long told her own office staff not to send messages after six in the evening. Her objection is to how the current draft is written. Freight operations do not follow ordinary office hours, and a driver delayed at a border crossing late at night may need a dispatcher who is still awake and reachable. Under the draft as it stands, answering that call would count against the rule. Lefebvre says she would accept the proposal if it let individual staff choose for themselves whether to stay reachable, instead of setting one fixed cut-off time for every job. Anneke Coetzee, a researcher at Harnley Business School, has examined countries that already passed similar laws, and her findings complicate the picture for supporters. Where staff are allowed to waive the right by agreement, she found that most do so quietly when they are first hired, unwilling to start a job by refusing a request. Where the right cannot be waived at all, she found that employers instead shift the pressure elsewhere, through earlier deadlines, tighter shift schedules, or supervisors who simply expect messages to have been seen anyway. Taken together, none of the three rests the case for the right on productivity: Ansari sets that question aside, Lefebvre accepts the principle and disputes how the rule is drafted, and Coetzee reports what happened after such laws passed elsewhere. What divides them is who should be allowed to make claims on a worker's unpaid time, and that is not a question further data on productivity is likely to settle.