EMPLOYEES FROM AFTER-HOURS WORK DEMANDS
ABSTRACT
The nature of work has shifted considerably over the past two decades. With smartphones, laptops and constant messaging, the divide that once separated office hours from personal time has all but disappeared. It has become routine for employees to answer work messages well into the night, take calls over the weekend, and remain mentally tuned in even when they are formally off duty. This paper examines the right to disconnect, defined here as an employee’s entitlement to step away from work-related contact once their working hours are over, and looks at how various jurisdictions have begun to recognise and protect this entitlement through law. The central claim of the paper is that India’s failure to legislate on this front is more than a gap in policy; it amounts to a constitutional shortfall, since the Supreme Court has already read Article 21’s guarantee of life to encompass health, leisure, and privacy. Drawing comparisons with France, Australia and Portugal in particular, and assessing where India’s labour law framework currently stands and where it falls short, the paper makes the case for a standalone right to disconnect statute in India, and closes with concrete proposals for its design, with particular emphasis on IT employees and workers in the informal sector.
KEYWORDS
Right to Disconnect, Work-Life Balance, Labour Law, Digital Overwork, Employee Rights, After-Hours Communication
I. INTRODUCTION
When I first started reading about labour law, one thing struck me most of our laws were written for a very different world. The Factories Act talks about shift timings and rest intervals as if work begins and ends at a fixed point in the day. But that is not how work looks anymore. People I know who work in IT or corporate jobs are always on their phones replying to emails late at night, attending calls over weekends, never really switching off. I chose this topic because I wanted to understand whether the law has anything to say about this or whether it is simply a reality workers are expected to accept.
The problem has a name now, digital overwork. Smartphones, laptops and apps like WhatsApp and Slack have stretched the workday so far that the line separating “on duty” from “off duty” barely exists anymore. Employees are expected to be available well beyond their official shift and many feel they cannot say no without risking their jobs or their reputation at work. This is not just a matter of inconvenience. Studies and reports by international bodies like the International Labour Organization have shown that overwork leads to burnout, anxiety, depression and serious physical health problems over time.[1] The COVID-19 pandemic made things considerably worse, when everyone started working from home, the workday simply never ended for many people.
A number of countries have responded by enacting laws under which employees can lawfully step away from work communications once their shift ends, without fear of being penalised for it. France led the way back in 2016, with Ireland, Portugal, Belgium, and most recently Australia following.[2] In 2021, the European Parliament went a step further by adopting a resolution calling on all EU member states to bring in legislation of their own on this front.[3] India has nothing comparable. Our labour statutes are largely quiet on the subject, and a vast number of employees, particularly those working in IT and other service-based industries, have no legal recourse whatsoever.
The central claim of this paper, then, is that not having a right to disconnect in India is not merely an oversight in policy; it is a gap in the law itself. The groundwork for such a right is already laid in the Constitution, particularly in how the Supreme Court has read Article 21 over the decades. What India lacks is not the legal foundation but the political will to build on it. With that in mind, the paper looks at how a range of other countries have tackled this issue, takes stock of where Indian law currently stands and where its shortcomings lie, and ends with a set of proposals for what a right to disconnect law in India might actually contain.
II. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This paper follows a doctrinal method throughout, meaning it works by examining and analysing primary legal materials, judicial decisions, legislative texts, and existing academic commentary, rather than gathering new data. Source material includes Indian and foreign statutes, decisions of Indian courts, international instruments, parliamentary committee reports, and scholarly writing. The paper is also comparative in nature, in that it looks at how the issue has been handled elsewhere and considers what India might usefully take from those experiences. No empirical research or fieldwork forms part of this study.
III. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
While doing research for this paper, I noticed that most of the writing on the right to disconnect comes from Europe, which makes sense, since European countries have been the first to legislate on it. The ILO’s 2019 research paper on working time is one of the most useful documents on this subject. It talks about a “time sovereignty” crisis, the idea that workers have lost control over their own time because digital technology keeps them connected to work even when they are not officially at work.[4] I found this phrase quite striking because it captures something that is hard to explain otherwise: it is not just about long hours, it is about the feeling that your time is never fully your own.
Ewing and Hendy, writing about labour rights more broadly, make the point that fundamental rights at work must evolve as working conditions change.[5] This argument feels especially relevant here. Our labour laws have not kept up with the way technology has changed the workplace. Acemoglu and Johnson, in their book Power and Progress, take a comparable view from a different angle. Their argument is that technology has no inherent tendency to benefit workers, and absent conscious legal and policy intervention, it tends instead to tilt toward employers’ interests.[6] I think this is exactly what has happened with digital communication tools in the workplace.
On the Indian side, the academic literature is thinner, which itself tells us something. Pravin Nikam’s analysis of the four Labour Codes points out that while the consolidation exercise was meant to modernise Indian labour law, it largely just reorganised old laws rather than addressing new problems like digital overwork.[7] The Arjun Sengupta Committee Report, though focused on the unorganised sector, is also worth mentioning because it emphasised that the right to fair working conditions has to be understood broadly, not just in terms of wages but in terms of the overall conditions of work.[8]
The most relevant judicial contribution comes from the Supreme Court’s decision in Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India,[9] stands out as the most important judicial contribution on this point. Although the case dealt with occupational health hazards in factories and had nothing to do with digital overwork, the Court’s reasoning, that health and leisure are bound up with the right to life guaranteed by Article 21, translates well to the present context. Once leisure is accepted as part of what Article 21 protects, a regime that erodes that leisure through round-the-clock digital availability stops being a mere policy concern and becomes a constitutional one.
IV. METHOD: ANALYSIS OF THE LAW
A. Global Legal Developments
France was the first to move on this front. A 2016 amendment to its Labour Code placed an obligation on companies with over 50 employees to sit down with their workforce and negotiate, rather than unilaterally decide, how the right to disconnect from digital devices outside working hours would operate in practice.[10] This was a significant step because it acknowledged, for the first time in law, that employees have a legitimate interest in not being reachable outside work hours. The French law does not impose a blanket ban on after-hours contact, but it does require companies to put a written policy in place. If a company fails to negotiate such a policy, the law still applies, which means the obligation cannot simply be avoided by staying silent.
Ireland’s approach unfolded in stages: certain protections were first written into the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018, and a Code of Practice on the Right to Disconnect followed in 2021, though this latter instrument operates on a voluntary, guidance-based footing rather than as binding law.[11] Even though Ireland’s framework leans on persuasion rather than strict enforcement, its message is unambiguous: workers are entitled to leave after-hours messages unanswered, and doing so should not expose them to any form of penalty from their employer. What makes the Irish approach interesting is its bet that workplace culture can shift through guidance and example rather than through the immediate threat of sanctions.
Portugal’s 2021 reform went a step beyond what France and Ireland had done: under its amended law, an employer who contacts staff outside working hours, barring a genuine emergency, is acting unlawfully, and repeat offenders face fines. Among the models surveyed here, this is arguably the strongest version of the right to disconnect on the books anywhere, and it reflects a view, increasingly shared across Europe, that overwork is best treated as a public health concern rather than a private dispute between an employer and its staff.
Belgium’s reform came in two stages. Civil servants were granted a right to disconnect in 2022, and this was later extended to private employers, where firms employing more than 20 people must now build provisions on after-hours contact into their internal work regulations. What is notable about the Belgian approach is that it does not treat digital overwork as a problem confined to senior management; it acknowledges that it is often lower-paid staff who feel least able to push back when a manager reaches out after hours.
The most recent addition to this list, and the one that takes the discussion outside Europe altogether, is Australia’s Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024, in force since August 2024. It gives employees a direct entitlement to leave employer contact unmonitored, unread, or unanswered once their shift has ended, provided that doing so is not unreasonable given the circumstances.[12] Importantly, the statute also shields the employee from any retaliatory step, so dismissal, demotion or other disciplinary action taken because someone exercised this right would itself fall foul of the law. That a country of Australia’s size and economic diversity has gone down this road suggests the right to disconnect is no longer a uniquely European preoccupation.
There has also been movement at the EU level. In January 2021, the European Parliament adopted a resolution pressing the European Commission to draft a directive that would secure this right for workers across the entire bloc.[13] The resolution flagged that being permanently reachable takes a toll on workers’ wellbeing in both mind and body, and warned against digital tools becoming a means of exerting control over employees rather than simply assisting their work. It is not binding in itself, but it does point toward where international labour standards seem to be headed.
B. The Position in India
No standalone right to disconnect statute exists in India. That said, it would be wrong to conclude that the law has nothing at all to say on the matter. A number of existing statutory and constitutional provisions touch on this terrain in indirect ways, even though none of them were drafted with smartphones, emails, or after-hours messaging in mind.
Among Indian statutes touching on working hours, the Factories Act, 1948 remains the most prominent.[14] Among other things, it caps the working day at nine hours and the working week at forty-eight, and builds in entitlements to rest intervals and weekly time off. But its reach is narrow: the Act applies only to factories in the sense of manufacturing units employing workers above a set threshold. IT firms, startups, law offices, media houses, and, more broadly, the entire population of white-collar and digital-first employees, the very group most exposed to after-hours messaging, fall outside its scope entirely. The result is that a software engineer in Bengaluru or a paralegal in Delhi has no recourse against being contacted at midnight, purely because their workplace isn’t a “factory” in the statutory sense.
The Information Technology Act, 2000, India’s principal statute on electronic transactions and cyber regulation,[15] says nothing about employment conditions or working hours. This silence is conspicuous: the IT sector is among India’s biggest employers and is, by reputation, the sector most identified with long hours and digital overwork, yet there is no working-time regime that applies to it specifically. Given that India hosts what is by some measures the world’s largest IT workforce, this absence of regulation is a notable shortfall.
A more recent development is India’s consolidation of 29 separate central labour statutes into four Labour Codes, namely the Code on Wages 2019, the Industrial Relations Code 2020, the Code on Social Security 2020, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020.[16] These Codes do touch on hours of work and overtime pay, but on the whole they reorganise rules that were already on the books rather than tackling newer issues such as employees being expected to remain reachable after their shift ends.[17] The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code does bring some previously uncovered categories of workers within its fold, but even this does not engage with digital overwork in any form. Viewed as a whole, the four Codes represented a chance to bring Indian labour law into step with how work is actually organised today, a chance that, on this particular issue, was not taken.
C. Constitutional Foundations
Even in the absence of dedicated legislation, India’s Constitution offers more support for this kind of right than one might initially expect. None of the relevant provisions were drafted with smartphones or instant messaging in mind, of course, but the way the Supreme Court has approached Article 21 over time leaves room for precisely this kind of argument. The provision itself guarantees life and personal liberty[18] and the Court has interpreted it to cover a remarkably wide range of rights over the years.
In Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation,[19], the Court recognised livelihood as falling within the scope of the right to life. Extending that logic, if the right to live protects one’s ability to earn, it seems a small step to say it should also have something to say about the terms on which that earning happens, including whether a person can ever be truly off-duty.
A judgment that speaks even more directly to this issue is Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India,[20], where leisure was treated as an element of the right to life in its own right, with the Court describing a worker’s wellbeing, covering both mind and body, as bound up with that right. Reading this case against the present problem, there is a reasonable argument that an employee who is expected to stay mentally alert to work matters even during their personal hours is being denied exactly the kind of protection Article 21 was meant to offer.
Another decision worth bringing into this discussion is the privacy ruling in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India[21]. A nine-judge bench in that case confirmed privacy as a fundamental right flowing from Article 21, one that extends to informational privacy as well as a person’s ability to govern their own time and personal space. Looked at through that lens, an employer’s standing expectation of round-the-clock digital availability begins to look less like an ordinary feature of modern work and more like a steady encroachment on an employee’s autonomy over their own life.
D. International Law Obligations
This domestic picture is reinforced by India’s commitments under international human rights law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, recognises in Article 24 an entitlement to rest and leisure that carries with it some reasonable cap on the length of the working day.[22] A similar idea appears in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which India became a party to in 1979; Article 7(d) of that treaty speaks to rest, leisure, sensible caps on working time, and paid periodic holidays as things workers are entitled to expect.[23] Granted, neither of these instruments can be invoked in an Indian court the way an ordinary statute could. Their value lies elsewhere: India’s courts have repeatedly drawn on the country’s international commitments when working out what fundamental rights actually mean, so even if no employee could file a case citing the ICESCR directly, these instruments still feed into, and strengthen, the broader constitutional argument that the beginnings of a right to disconnect can already be found within Indian law.
V. SUGGESTIONS
Drawing on the discussion so far, the following recommendations are offered as a way of tackling the problem of after-hours work demands within the Indian context:
1. A Dedicated Legislation: India would benefit from either a freestanding Right to Disconnect Act, or, failing that, a dedicated chapter inserted into one of the existing Labour Codes, granting employees a statutory entitlement to leave work-related messages unanswered once their official shift has ended. Coverage should not be limited to factories; the law needs to reach IT firms, service-sector businesses, media houses, and any other employer relying on digital tools to stay in touch with staff. It should also pin down what counts as “working hours” with precision, making clear that anything outside that window is the employee’s own time.
2. Anti-Retaliation Protections: Any law on the right to disconnect must include strong and enforceable protections against retaliation. An employee who refuses to respond to a message at 11 PM should not face disciplinary action, poor performance reviews, threats of non-renewal of contract, or termination. The law should clearly make such retaliation unlawful and should provide for monetary compensation to the aggrieved employee, as well as reinstatement where applicable. Without these teeth, the right to disconnect will remain only on paper.
3. Employer Obligations: Employers should be required to clearly define working hours in employment contracts and to develop written internal policies on after-hours communication. Large companies — say, those employing more than 50 workers — should be required to negotiate such policies with employee representatives or trade unions, similar to the French model.[24] Smaller employers could be required to simply adopt and display a written policy. This ensures that there is clarity from the start about when work ends and when personal time begins.
4. Exceptions for Genuinely Urgent Situations: The law should, of course, allow for genuine emergencies. Like the Australian model,[25] the statute could protect an employee’s choice not to respond unless that choice would be unreasonable given the surrounding facts. What counts as reasonable could depend on factors such as what the employee’s job actually involves, how genuinely time-sensitive the matter is, whether they are paid an on-call allowance, and the extent to which the contact eats into their personal time. A test of this kind keeps the right workable in practice without leaving room for it to be gamed.
5. Coverage of Gig and Informal Workers: A large part of India’s workforce is in the informal economy or in gig work. Delivery workers, cab drivers, and freelance platform workers are effectively on-call at all times through their apps, with no guaranteed off-hours at all. Any new law must seriously think about how to extend some form of protection to these workers too, perhaps by requiring platforms to build in mandatory offline hours or by guaranteeing a minimum number of rest hours within any 24-hour period.
6. Awareness and Enforcement: Laws alone are not enough, especially in a country where many workers particularly those in informal employment or on short-term contracts are afraid to assert their rights for fear of losing their jobs. There must be proper enforcement machinery, including labour inspectors who can investigate complaints, a clear and accessible grievance redressal mechanism, and sustained public awareness campaigns so that workers actually know what their rights are. Unions and civil society organisations should also be empowered to bring collective complaints on behalf of workers.
VI. CONCLUSION
Far from being a perk or a nicety, the ability to switch off from work is tied closely to a person’s dignity and wellbeing. An employee who is expected to remain on call indefinitely is, in effect, handing over their own time to their employer for free, with nothing in the way of compensation, agreement, or legal backing. That is not simply unjust; given the Supreme Court’s reading of life, leisure, and privacy under Article 21, there is a strong case that it is unconstitutional as well.
What emerges from this comparative survey is a fairly consistent pattern: France, Ireland, Portugal, Belgium, and Australia have each, in their own way, concluded that the problems brought on by the digital age call for fresh legal solutions. Where work ends and personal life begins used to be marked by something as simple as a factory whistle or an office closing for the night; now, that boundary has to be drawn by legislation instead. No two of these jurisdictions have gone about it identically, which is actually an advantage for India, since it leaves room to borrow selectively from each and shape something suited to local conditions.
India finds itself at a meaningful turning point. The country has a young, expanding workforce, a thriving technology industry, and courts that have shown they are willing to read the Constitution expansively when the situation calls for it. The four Labour Codes represented one chance to confront digital overwork, and that chance slipped by; the next opportunity to legislate on this front should not be allowed to do the same. A well-drafted, enforceable right to disconnect would do more than safeguard workers’ health and family life, it would, over time, contribute to workplaces that function better and produce better outcomes. The evidence on this point is fairly consistent: employees who get adequate rest tend to make fewer errors, bring more creativity to their work, and stay with their employers longer.
There is also a deeper point here about what kind of society we want to build. If we believe as our Constitution says that every person has the right to live with dignity, then we must also believe that every worker has the right to a life outside of work. The right to disconnect is, at its heart, the right to be a complete human being not just an employee.
As a first-year law student, what strikes me most about this topic is how the law always seems to be playing catch-up with technology. The Factories Act was written for a world of assembly lines and shift work. We now live in a world of WhatsApp groups, midnight emails and always-on expectations. The law needs to catch up and it needs to do so before an entire generation of workers burns out waiting for it.
REFERENCES
A. Cases
Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India (1995) 3 SCC 42.
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation AIR 1986 SC 180.
B. Legislation
Code du travail [Labour Code] art L2242-17 (France).
Constitution of India 1950.
Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018 (Act No. 38/2018) (Ireland).
Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth) (Australia).
The Code on Wages 2019 (Act No. 29 of 2019) (India).
The Factories Act 1948 (Act No. 63 of 1948) (India).
The Industrial Relations Code 2020 (Act No. 35 of 2020) (India).
The Information Technology Act 2000 (Act No. 21 of 2000) (India).
The Code on Social Security 2020 (Act No. 36 of 2020) (India).
The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (Act No. 37 of 2020) (India).
C. International Instruments
European Parliament Resolution of 21 January 2021 with recommendations to the Commission on the right to disconnect (2019/2181(INL)), 2021 OJ (C 456) 1.
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976) 993 UNTS 3.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 10 December 1948) UNGA Res 217A(III).
D. Books
Acemoglu D and Johnson S, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs 2023).
E. Journal Articles
Ewing KD and Hendy J, ‘The Dramatic Implications of Demir and Baykara’ (2010) 39(1) Industrial Law Journal 2.
Nikam P, ‘India’s Labour Law Reforms: A Critical Analysis of the Four Labour Codes’ (2022) 64(2) Journal of the Indian Law Institute 201.
F. Reports and Other Sources
International Labour Organization, ‘Working Time and the Future of Work’ (ILO Research Paper No 33, 2019) <https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—inst/documents/publication/wcms_736541.pdf> accessed 10 May 2026.
Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, ‘Report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector’ (2007) (Arjun Sengupta Committee Report).
Standing Committee on Labour, Parliament of India, ‘Report on the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019’ (42nd Report, 2020).
Garvitaa Agarwal
First Year, LL.B.
Law Centre – II, Faculty of Law
University of Delhi
[1]International Labour Organization, Working Time and the Future of Work (ILO Research Paper No. 33, 2019) <https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—inst/documents/publication/wcms_736541.pdf> accessed 10 May 2026.
[2]Code du travail [Labour Code] art. L2242-17 (Fr.) (as amended by Loi no. 2016-1088 du 8 about 2016 relative au travail, a la modernisation du dialogue social et a la securisation des parcours professionals).
[3]European Parliament Resolution of 21 January 2021 with recommendations to the Commission on the right to disconnect (2019/2181(INL)), 2021 O.J. (C 456) 1.
[5]K.D. Ewing and John Hendy, ‘The Dramatic Implications of Demir and Baykara’ (2010) 39(1) Industrial Law Journal 2, 12.
[6]Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs 2023) 187.
[7]Pravin Nikam, ‘India’s Labour Law Reforms: A Critical Analysis of the Four Labour Codes’ (2022) 64(2) Journal of the Indian Law Institute 201, 215.
[8]Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, ‘Report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector’ (2007) (Arjun Sengupta Committee Report).
[9]Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India (1995) 3 SCC 42, 65.
[11]Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018 (Act No. 38/2018) (Ir.).
[12]Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth) s 333M (Austl.).
[14]The Factories Act 1948 (Act No. 63 of 1948), ss 54-56.
[15]The Information Technology Act 2000 (Act No. 21 of 2000).
[16]The Code on Wages 2019 (Act No. 29 of 2019); The Industrial Relations Code 2020 (Act No. 35 of 2020); The Code on Social Security 2020 (Act No. 36 of 2020); The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (Act No. 37 of 2020).
[17]Standing Committee on Labour, Parliament of India, ‘Report on the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019’ (42nd Report, 2020).
[18]Constitution of India 1950, art 21.
[19]Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation AIR 1986 SC 180.
[21]Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
[22]Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 10 December 1948) UNGA Res 217A(III), art 24.
[23]International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976) 993 UNTS 3, art 7(d).
