CONCEPT
Right to Disconnect
The class of labor regulations — first enacted in France (2017), now adopted across Europe and beyond — that establish employees' legal right to refuse work communications outside designated hours, the contemporary precedent for the temporal dams Wajcman's framework calls for in the AI age.
The right to disconnect is the regulatory principle that employees have a legal right to refuse work-related communications, expectations of availability, and productive demands outside their designated working hours. France enacted the first national law establishing this right in January 2017, requiring companies with more than fifty employees to negotiate formal policies governing after-hours communication. The principle has since spread to Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Australia, and several other nations, typically through either legislation or collective bargaining agreements. The framework provides the most relevant contemporary precedent for the kind of temporal dams Wajcman's analysis suggests AI adoption requires.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original French law emerged from concerns about burnout, work-life balance, and the dissolution of boundaries between professional and personal life that digital communication had produced. The legal mechanism was deliberately modest — it did not prohibit after-hours communication but