France made it illegal to expect employees to answer emails after hours.
On January 1, 2017, a provision of France's Loi Travail (Labor Law) took effect requiring companies with more than fifty employees to negotiate with workers over the right to disconnect from digital work tools outside of working hours.1 The provision was part of a broader labor reform package championed by Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri and was commonly referred to as the droit à la déconnexion, the right to disconnect.
The law did not ban after-hours emails outright. It required companies to establish charters defining when employees were not expected to send or respond to digital communications. The burden was on the employer to create the boundaries, not on the employee to enforce them.2
France was not the first country to address the issue. Germany's Labor Ministry had issued guidelines in 2013 discouraging after-hours contact, and Volkswagen had programmed its servers to stop forwarding emails to employee phones between 6:15 p.m. and 7 a.m. as early as 2011.3
By 2023, right-to-disconnect legislation had been enacted or proposed in at least a dozen countries, including Spain, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, and Australia.4 The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2021 calling on the European Commission to propose a directive establishing the right to disconnect as a fundamental right across the EU.5
The French phrase named a problem that the smartphone had created and that no employment contract had anticipated: the abolition of the boundary between working time and private time.