On May 10th, the French government used a parliamentary maneuver to push through the El Khomri law, a series of measures that will reform the conditions under which French people work. The law has been tremendously unpopular. A poll taken in March found that seventy-one per cent of French citizens were opposed to it and thought that its provisions—allowing failing companies to fire employees, for example—would overwhelmingly benefit management, rather than workers. The opponents have expressed their spleen in numerous ways, occupying the Place de la République and clashing with police. (Last week, the French police staged their own demonstration, to which counterprotesters reacted by throwing a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police car.) Hidden in the bowels of this loi de merde, in a chapter titled “The Adaptation of Work Rights to the Digital Era,” is Article 25, a lovable little proviso. It proposes a remedy to the problem of ever-dinging iPhones and bulging voice-mail boxes, dinnertime conference calls and 4 A.M. reply-alls. Voici, the most newfangled human right since the right to be forgotten: le droit de la déconnexion, or the right to disconnect.
The right to disconnect! Do I even have to finish this article? “The development of information and communication technologies, if badly managed or regulated, can have an impact on the health of workers,” Article 25 states. “Among them, the burden of work and the informational overburden, the blurring of the borders between private life and professional life, are risks associated with the usage of digital technology.” The law suggests that companies—following the lead of Volkswagen, which turns off its servers after hours, and Daimler, which allows employees to automatically delete e-mails they receive while on vacation—negotiate formal policies to limit the encroachment of work into people’s homes (or bingo halls, or salsa clubs, or wherever it is they find themselves when they’re away from the office). In one way, the legislation seeks to regulate a simple labor issue: no one wants to do work for which he's not getting paid. But there’s an appealingly metaphysical aspect to its recognition that not everything—our devices and, by extension, ourselves—can be “on” all the time, that each of us is entitled to the prerogative of occasional self-erasure. The right to disconnect is effectively the right to be forgotten between the hours of six and nine.
The temptation is to extrapolate from the law something about French attitudes toward work. As Pamela Druckerman explained recently, in an excellent column, they do vary somewhat from American ones, but not in the ways you might think. The notion of the indolent French worker, for one thing, is a fiction: the country’s hourly productivity, for example, rivals that of the United States, and French workers put in more hours a year than their supposedly more industrious German counterparts. The difference, then, is not in our attitudes toward our jobs but in our attitudes toward the rest of our lives. In France, a personal life is not a passive entity, the leftover bits of one’s existence that haven’t been gobbled up by the office, but a separate entity, the sovereignty of which is worth defending, even if that means that someone’s spreadsheet doesn’t get finished on time. A recent study of American workers found that sixty-seven per cent had experienced “phantom rings”—they were worried that someone was trying to get in touch with them, even when they were theoretically free. The right to disconnect, then, isn’t a French problem, but rather a French response to one with which we are all grappling.
So what if we could all mute our phones on the weekends, let our laptops gather dust during vacation, never again feel a buzzing in our pockets just as the appetizer arrives? Would we? And, if we did, would we be happier? The right to disconnect isn’t necessarily an obligation to do so, but it’s an opportunity—to claim a little breathing room; to realize that the world won’t stop turning, or even producing words or widgets, without one person’s constant vigilance. In the guise of grumpiness, it actually ventures an optimistic proposition: everything will be all right. And, if it isn’t, eighty per cent of French households still have landlines.
