Michigan bill would let workers ignore the boss after hours — and the thread split on whether it matters
Senate Bill 948 would bar Michigan employers from requiring staff to read or answer work messages off the clock. The comment thread divided less over the bill than over whether after-hours contact is even a real problem.
State Sen. Erika Geiss's Workplace Employee Boundaries Act would stop employers from requiring access or replies to emails, texts and shift-scheduling messages outside assigned hours. Violations go to the state labor department; carve-outs cover contracted on-call pay, emergencies, and hours you set yourself.
The reversal wasn't legal, it was social: a wave of engineers replied 'this never happens to me,' and a 12k-karma commenter called that the least useful response possible — someone telling you the world works differently is a gift, not noise.
A bill that says you can put the phone down at 5
Michigan's Senate Bill 948, the Workplace Employee Boundaries Act from Sen. Erika Geiss (D-Taylor), would prohibit employers from requiring an employee to access or respond to work-related communications — emails, texts, social-media messages about duties or shift scheduling — outside their assigned hours. It is not a blanket ban on contact: employees can be paid for on-call availability in their contract, can set their own availability windows, and messages about state or federal emergencies affecting operations are exempt. Enforcement runs through Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with possible company fines or overtime pay owed to the worker. Geiss framed it around an "always-on, always available" economy that needs "stronger boundaries." The bill sits in the Labor Committee.
One lawyerly question got a clean answer in the thread: how does this square with salaried versus hourly status?
"It doesn't. As drafted it applies to exempt employees. (It's just a proposed bill; it's unlikely to happen and if it picked up any steam presumably it would be drafted more carefully.)" — tptacek
"This never happens to me" became its own argument
What actually animated the discussion wasn't the statute — it was a string of comfortable replies. One person opened with "Maybe I just have abnormal leverage"; another, an SRE, said he simply keeps a second phone and has never been challenged on ignoring it after hours. That posture drew a pointed rebuke.
"'This doesn't happen to me' is about the least interesting or useful response you could have to someone telling you something happens to them… someone telling you about their lived experience of the world is a gift." — an engineer with 12k karma pushing back on the thread's tone
The people closest to the abusive cases named the industries the SREs don't work in: retail, food service, hospitality, teaching, sales — where managers text the whole crew at all hours to cover shifts.
"This is a pretty self-selecting group… If you've ever worked in hospitality or retail, you'll know that managers will call/contact you at all hours to make sure they have coverage." — a commenter naming the sectors where it is routine
One reply detailed an executive who went dark during business hours, tagged people in Slack at 9PM and Sunday mornings, and threatened to fire those who weren't responsive enough — including once on vacation.
The skeptics' real worry: compensation, not contact
A second camp argued the problem is better solved by pay than by law.
"I think stuff like this is much better settled with compensation than legislation… my friends would deprioritize jobs with lots of on-call needs, but would still take the jobs if they were exceptional in some way or the comp was especially good." — a general partner at Susa Ventures, formerly LinkedIn's second non-founding engineer
The rebuttal was that markets only compensate because law forces them to, and that an EA asked to "just check email in the evening" is effectively made on-call 24/7. There's a concrete reason the venue matters more than either side argued: the bill is single-state, so its first real test is whether Michigan — which several commenters noted is already growing poorer than its neighbors — can hold a worker-protection line without watching on-call tech roles quietly relocate across the border.
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