Right to Disconnect

The proliferation of smartphones, emails, and instant messaging platforms has blurred the boundary between working time and personal time. What was once confined to the office now follows employees home, on holiday, and into bed via a glowing screen. Digitalization has undeniably given employers and employees great flexibility in the time, place, and method of work, reducing commuting time and easing the reconciliation of personal and professional life. Yet this same process has normalized the use of digital tools outside working hours, pushing employees into an identity of being "always available," "always online," and "always on standby." This piece examines the emergence of the "right to disconnect" as a distinct legal concept, situates it within the broader human rights and labour law framework, and surveys how different jurisdictions have chosen to give it effect.

The COVID-19 pandemic sharply accelerated the erosion of boundaries between work and rest. According to the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), employees who work regularly from home are more than twice as likely as those working on employer premises to exceed the 48-hour weekly maximum working time set by EU law, and to fail to receive the minimum 11 hours of rest between two working days. Roughly 30% of remote workers report working in their own time every day or several times a week, compared with under 8% of office-based workers a striking shift from the pre-pandemic baseline, when only about 5% of the population worked remotely at all. 

Other empirical studies corroborate the trend: research by Harvard Business School, analyzing 3.1 million emails and meetings across sixteen global cities, found that the average workday lengthened by 8.2% (48.5 minutes) in the first weeks of the pandemic, while data collected by NordVPN Teams showed that remote workers' daily screen time increased by more than two hours in the UK, Austria, Canada, and the United States. With hybrid and remote work now a permanent fixture of the labour market rather than a temporary emergency measure, these pressures have outlasted the crisis that produced them.

The right to disconnect can be defined, in its simplestform, as an employee's right not to engage in work related tasks outside working hours and not to respond to work-related notifications received through digital tools such as email or messaging apps. The European Parliament has gone further, characterizing it as a fundamental right enabling employees to refrain from work-related tasks — including calls, emails, and other digital communications — without being penalized for doing so. A useful conceptual distinction, drawn out in a Eurofound study covering all 27 EU member states, is between two different models of the right: "the right to disconnect," understood as the employee's active power to refrain from working through digital tools outside agreed hours, and "the right to be disconnected," understood instead as an obligation placed on the employer to ensure employees do not work during rest and leave periods. 

The European Parliament's own draft directive adopts the former model, framing the right as belonging to the employee while placing employers under a correlative duty to make its exercise genuinely possible. The scope of "digital tools" is deliberately broad: it covers not only communication media (the internet, mobile and satellite telephony, wireless networks) but also the underlying hardware and software that process and transmit data. This means the right to disconnect is not limited to refusing to answer a call or an email — it can extend to tasks performed on a computer that require no live network connection at all, provided they are still "work".

No treaty currently enshrines a freestanding, binding "right to disconnect" in international law. Its legal foundations are instead assembled from adjacent guarantees: the limitation of working time under ILO Convention No. 1 (1919, capping industrial work at eight hours a day and 48 hours a week) and ILO Convention No. 30 (1930, extending similar protection to commerce and offices); the right to rest and leisure under Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and, at the regional level, the Council of Europe's Revised European Social Charter of 1996, which protects fair working conditions and reasonable rest periods (Article 3), collective bargaining (Article 6), and the position of workers with family responsibilities (Article 27).

 The International Labour Organization has not adopted a dedicated convention on the subject, but in 2021 it issued, jointly with the World Health Organization, technical guidance on "Healthy and Safe Telework," identifying constant connectivity as an occupational health risk and calling on governments and employers to support employees' ability to disconnect. This reflects a broader pattern: the right to disconnect is being built less through new treaty law than through the reinterpretation of long-standing occupational health, working-time, and privacy standards for a digital context.

At present, there is no EU-wide instrument specifically regulating the right to disconnect, and national approaches vary considerably. Movement began with soft-law and social-dialogue instruments: in June 2020, the European social partners concluded a Framework Agreement on Digitalisation, allowing employers and unions to negotiate arrangements on employees being reachable online and offline. The decisive political moment came on 21 January 2021, when the European Parliament adopted, by 472 votes in favor, a resolution calling on the Commission to propose a directive establishing a right to disconnect for all employees using digital tools professionally, and annexing its own draft text. The draft would apply to all sectors, public and private, and to workers regardless of formal status, relying on the Court of Justice of the European Union's settled criteria for "worker" status (performing services for a period, under another's direction, for remuneration) rather than deferring entirely to national definitions. 

Notably, the draft does not carve out an explicit exemption for critical-infrastructure operators, healthcare institutions, or managerial staff, though its cross-reference to the Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC) and other instruments leaves open — and contested in the academic literature — whether the personal exemptions available under that directive (for example, for senior managers) also apply here. Substantively, the draft obliges member states to ensure that employers, after consulting social partners, put in place concrete arrangements: practical mechanisms for switching off professional digital tools (including monitoring software), a system for measuring working time, an occupational health and safety assessment addressing psychosocial risk, and defined criteria and compensation for the limited circumstances — such as force majeure — in which exceptions may be permitted. The requirement to measure working time echoes the CJEU's 2019 ruling in CCOO v Deutsche Bank SAE, where the Court held that, to give effet utile to the Working Time Directive and Article 31(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, member states must require employers to establish an objective, reliable, and accessible system for recording daily working time — a system the draft directive also requires to respect employees' privacy and data-protection rights.

 The draft further requires effective, proportionate, and dissuasive sanctions for non-compliance. Parliamentary momentum has continued outside the legislative process itself: in mid-2023 a coalition of entrepreneurs, labour-rights advocates, and researchers calling itself the Future Workforce Alliance introduced a "European Charter for Digital Workplace Wellbeing," signed by numerous MEPs, one pillar of which — "Life Outside Work" — is dedicated to guaranteeing the right to disconnect, including for independent and platform workers rather than only those with classic employee status.

In the absence of binding EU legislation, individual member states — and some non-EU jurisdictions — have moved at very different speeds and through very different legal instruments.

 France was the first mover. An amendment to the French Labour Code, in force since 1 January 2017, requires companies with 50 or more employees to negotiate arrangements for exercising the right to disconnect, and shields employees from disciplinary sanction for doing so. The French Ministry of Labour's own report on the reform explicitly rejected a "one size fits all" solution, favouring company-level negotiation between employer and employee representatives.

 Italy, also acting in 2017, chose an individual-contract model limited to "smart workers" who split their time between home and employer premises, with the terms of disconnection set out in a written agreement between employer and worker rather than imposed by statute. Belgium requires companies with at least 50 employees to address the issue through collective agreements. Spain, by contrast, adopted a genuinely universal statutory right in 2018 (Organic Law 3/2018), applying to all employees without exception, as part of a broader package of digital rights aimed at protecting rest time and family privacy. Portugal followed with a mandatory statutory regime in 2021, going further than most by exposing employers to administrative sanctions for out-of-hours contact outside cases of force majeure.

 Ireland took a softer route: a 2021 Workplace Relations Commission Code of Practice, while not formally binding, can nonetheless be relied upon in litigation, and sets out the principle that employees should not routinely be expected to work outside normal hours and must not be penalised for declining to do so. Germany, meanwhile, has pursued no direct statutory obligation at all, instead relying on cooperation among social partners — employer associations, the trade union confederation, and the federal labour ministry — with companies such as Volkswagen and BMW adopting notable voluntary practices as a result.

 Taken together, these seven models illustrate a spectrum running from binding statutory rights (Spain, Portugal), through collective-bargaining-based obligations (France, Belgium), to individual-contract arrangements (Italy), non-binding codes (Ireland), and purely voluntary social dialogue (Germany) — with the majority of EU member states still relying on general working-time and rest provisions with no disconnection-specific regulation at all.

The European Parliament's 2021 resolution frames constant connectivity not merely as an industrial relations inconvenience but as an occupational health and safety concern, citing risks of reduced attention and cognitive function, emotional overload, musculoskeletal disorders, isolation, technology dependence, sleep disruption, and burnout. This framing matters legally: it allows the right to disconnect to be anchored not only in working-time law but in the broader, well-established architecture of occupational health and safety regulation, and  through the privacy dimension of "always-on" monitoring — in data protection law as well. 

The right to disconnect sits at the intersection of several competing interests, several of which remain genuinely unresolved even within the EU's own draft directive. Employer organizations argue that a uniform disconnection obligation is difficult to reconcile with sectors where continuous contact may be operationally necessary — critical infrastructure and healthcare being the most frequently cited examples and favor flexible, sector-specific arrangements negotiated through collective bargaining rather than a rigid statutory rule. Trade unions, represented at EU level by the European Trade Union Confederation, take the opposite view, pressing for the right to extend to all employees, including managers, and warning against voluntary models that leave enforcement to the discretion of individual companies. 

Two further fault lines deserve particular attention. First, the relationship between working-time exemptions for managerial staff and the right to disconnect is unsettled: the rationale for the right — physical and mental rest — arguably applies with equal force to senior employees, yet it remains unclear at what point, if any, managerial exemptions under the Working Time Directive should limit its application. Second, the very mechanisms designed to make the right enforceable — systems that measure and record working time — create their own risk of enabling intrusive employer surveillance, requiring the law to draw a careful line between legitimate compliance monitoring and disproportionate oversight of employees' private time.