It's called "Worker's Rights" after all:

https://globalnaps.org/issue/workers-rights/

I'd put that under "Safe and healthy working conditions" and "reasonable limitation of working hours".

> Is the EU also going to come out with the "Right to breathe" and the "Right to go to the bathroom when you need to"?

Yes, when it becomes a practically accepted norm to violate that right. Is your point that government is overstepping the bounds, or that this type of right does not deserve protection? Or is it just about the semantics and definition of the word "right"?

> Rights are no longer something innate to all humans, they are something that the government gives to you when it wants.

I always thought that the humanity creates communities, countries and their governments to protect those rights, among other things.

Worker's rights _are_ rights of the utmost importance.

I'm curious as to how your perspective on these worker's rights and EU regulations generally has arisen ... is your primary experience of employment one based on working in the United States (which is ranked lower than a large number of European countries in the 2019 ITUC Global Rights)?

It means that if your contract is for 37.5 hours per week, you don't need to do email and be available on im outside of your daily 7.5 work hours. Being on call needs to be negotiated separately.

Rights aren't a thing until done by law.

Otherwise you are at mercy of company policy or whims of your employer.

From a US Constitutional perspective, rights are inherent, and the Bill of Rights protects citizens from laws that infringe on those rights. Rights are not given by the government via laws, they are inherent protections from invasive laws set by government.

That concept is called 'natural rights', and it wasn't invented by the US constitution. That document is just one of the more notable formal recognitions of natural rights in modern times.

Natural and human rights exist too, and they are often a bar by which we judge legal rights.

The right to not work all the time is most definitely an innate freedom of utmost importance, sitting directly on a line throughout history in the fight for worker's rights.

“The right to breathe” is actually a very important right and has led to environmental regulations. It’s correlated to “the right to not be harmed by others”.

There are laws about the number of toilets minimum temps ion the work place in the UK as well as breaks.

I assume the USA has building regs on toilets etc in work places

Th right to breathe seems like something worth dying for.

That basically happened:

> The Clean Air Act 1956 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted principally in response to London's Great Smog of 1952

> When the "Great Smog" fell over the city in December 1952 the effects were unprecedented: More than 4,000 people are thought to have died in the immediate aftermath,[4] raising public concern, with fog so thick it stopped trains, cars, and public events.[5] A further 8,000 died in following weeks and months.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956

Every regulation like this is a band-aid, and more band-aids will just make the EU even more quintessentially the EU.

If the governance focused on restoring negotiating power to workers, you wouldn't need to write to your MP to go to the toilet.

>If the governance focused on restoring negotiating power to workers

The right for workers to form a union is also a worker's right worth protecting.

But this is not a workable solution for every single employment relationship.

Are you saying I should have to negotiate the number of toilet breaks I get?

Yes, some people's work conditions are very bad and something needs to be done about that. That's beside the point.

If you need to ask the government to give you the right to use the bathroom, or to give you the right to not check your email, you've already lost.

What? That makes no sense.

This is the exact reason you even have a government, to protect your rights.

That is the point though. Some of these people have indeed "already lost" to the companies employing them and need assistance from a government or other powerful organisation to bring back some balance to that relationship.

Well, yes, you've already lost because your employer is taking that away from you?

So, your proposal is? Leave everything as is and change nothing?