Same here. Employers can't even look inside user's mailboxes because there is no guarantee that it doesn't contain anything personal. Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.

> Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.

Companies are not homogeneous blocks of matter and there is always information some people at the company may need to know that others have no business dealing with. Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.

Health related information may absolutely not be shared, and doesn't need to be.

Employer don't even get diagnosis behind sick leave. Not sure how work accidents are treated in that regard so.

Honestly I wasn't sure how much that point applied. However with people that suffer chronic illnesses or disabilities that require special consideration I would be surprised if it was always possible to adequately communicate those needs without also mentioning information that the employee might not want to share publicly.

You can communicate special needs (e.g. "do not put this person in a loud room"), but not health information (e.g. "this person has epilepsy"). I struggle to think a special consideration a person could need that you could not just articulate instead of whatever medical issue they have (at least it has never come up for me).

> Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.

I am against workplace surveillance, but why would people receive this information to their work email address?

Why would HR receive my information?

My bad, I misunderstood the above comment.

I don't think this is correct - even under the GDPR. If the company has good reason to look inside someone's mailbox (I don't think the bar for that is particularly high for a company email account) then any personal data they encounter would be being processed under "legitimate interest" as long as they don't do anything unnecessary with it in order to achieve whatever it was they were doing.

Tue bar is actually quite high. Teo things can block it: if there is a workers council, it has to approve surveillance of an employees use of IT systems. That surveillance can only be target to specific, named users and for specific purposes, almost like a mini search warrant. If there is no workers council, at the latest stage a court will have a very, very close look at what isbpresented as evidence. The middle ground is an affected employee's lawyer and the employer. Result being, that kind of comms / IT surveillance is basically never happeneing. Which is a very, very good thing!

You need to be specific about what legal jurisdiction you're talking about here then - the world is a very big place and different laws apply.

I'm not aware of any EU wide laws that prevent what you're talking about here. In the UK an employment contract will state that the employer can monitor your activity if they need to and this is completely legal.

Source: https://www.gov.uk/monitoring-work-workers-rights

In some countries (Germany springs to mind) there are much stricter rules. A blanket statement like the one you've made here is not correct unless you're being very specific about where you're talking about.

Germany it is, should have mentioned that.

this was way before gdpr. more like employee rights. employer cant just come by and snoop throu your drawers either.

Germany famously just passed legislation that forces employers to record working hours for all employees.

That is a non-issue regarding privacy and the intention is to ensure compliance with employee protection laws capping the maximum weekly working time.

You write down when you started working and you write down when you stop. Some employers automatically subtract your legally required break time, some want you to enter it manually.

Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee? If so what are they expected to work?

(I’m from Europe, have lived in US the past 8 years)

> Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee?

Yes. It’s called full-time employee. This encompasses anyone and everyone who does not work as an independent contractor.

> If so what are they expected to work?

40 hours per week.

With mandated minimum lunch time and breaks, paid minimum vacation, paid medical leave, paid maternity/paternity, govt mandated lunch allowance, govt mandated transportation allowance based on commute distance, and many other “perks” that US companies use as negotiation tactics.

If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay. Many employees waive the overtime thing for various reasons. In some industries because they’re exploited (restaurants and such), in other industries because they’re Mission Driven and want to work more (startups and such).

The law is there to protect you, but in practiceit comes down to your relationship with your boss.

edit: Personally, I don’t like this paternalistic/maternalistic attitude from either approach (as laws or as perks). Just pay me a shitload of money and let me figure out the rest. I’m old enough to buy my own lunch thank you.

"Salary" or "exempt" in the US is a sub-status of "Full Time Employee". FTE in the US has much of the same of what you say - less, but still some protections, most significantly requirements around paying overtime, and paying more for it: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime - "Unless exempt, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay."

Salary = exempt = no overtime for you, sucker. Over time, more and more people have fallen under that category in the US.

Is there something like that in the EU, where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?

> where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?

No, the EU is pretty strict about those things. Only way you can be ineligible for overtime is if you own the business. And even then you’re technically eligible, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying themselves overtime.

In practice the “exempt” part happens in a grey area: The boss and the employee shake hands to “make things simpler” and write down 40h every week in whatever tracking thingy. Worked less than 40? Great, you get 40. Worked more? Great, you get 40. wink wink

Also contractors though. I got into a quarrel with the lowlife recruiter that tried to coax me into accepting going on pager duty. They had no room for negotiation, whatever the customer said was the deal. I left… but it must have cost them a fortune in productivity loss. Penny wise, pound foolish

There are some very limited cases where overtime doesn’t apply. For example, managing directors are outside the scope of most labor regulations as they’re not technically employees.

At least in Germany, managerial employees (mostly defined through hiring and firing authority) are traditionally exempt though this might be in conflict with the relevant EU regulations. We’ll see.

What I’m seeing commonly today is that your contracts will say the work week is 40 hours but x hours of overtime a month are already compensated.

> If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay

Or you can request TOIL - Time Off In Lieu. That is a system designed to allow flexibility. Some jobs can't simply clock off when doing certain tasks. Provided it is agreed upon at contract negotiation time (ie the hiring process) then TOIL/overtime rates can work well for everyone.

Our (UK for me/EU) Employment Tribunals have a lot of power and a lot of law that generally favours the employee but also strives towards equitability. For the last 20+ years I hire but I still recall what being hired is like. I have found time and time again that being fair and open pays back in absolute spades. A pissed off employee is simply a burden and a cost. You can't please everyone all of the time but if you are known for fairness, that goes a long way.

I won't give you a shitload of money until you earn it for me 8) I too buy my own lunch and all other meals as required to live. I sometimes (always) need to be forced (cough reminded) to claim when we are contracting on a job that has allowances built in.

Some top tips for employees (EU/UK - perhaps others too): Do make sure you get things ironed out at the hiring stage. At the very least some things defined, written down and signed: Get place of work defined eg town/city - in the event of TUPE you may be required to move but if you have a defined place of work then you have all the aces! Get rates defined and a formal process for review. Hours of work. Responsibilities. Industry specifics. Read up on HR and how it works: you will be sat across the table with an expert in the law and how to err get the best out of you for the company which may not match up with your ideas. Do read up on all your govt provided advice - the GOV.UK stuff is pretty decent.

Basically: you have a duty to yourself to do your own due diligence, so please do it! You can expect to be treated reasonably fairly but you may not like the outcome so get the pack stacked fairly or at least not against you.

In the EU you should not be asked to work more that the maximum hours defined in the European Working Time Regulations. There is usually a range in these directives so member states can choose to go to the high or low end. But there is a range that has to be put into law for each country.

Basically you shouldn't lose your job for refusing to work more hours than are defined in the regulations, if you do there is a tribunal process. But, if the employee is willing there are ways around it.

A lot of contracts I'm seeing nowadays include the opt out of this working time directive.

They say you can opt in or out at any point by providing a written request to HR, but defaulting to opt out at the point when all the power is with the company (the candidate is signing the initial contract, and may not want to rock the boat) seems wrong IMO.

Whether ypu opt in or out of recording hours (not sure if ypu actually can opt out, courts will propably decide that soon enough), you cannot opt out of the max working hour limits put in law. One of the exceptions being upper management, and in Germany, funny enough, doctors...

The legal limit in Germany is 10 hours net, pkus whatever break time is applicable. One exception are mainly surveilling duties, e.g. monitoring security cameras, where the limit is 12 hours. One theoretical "work around" is declaring Saturdays normal working days, as they legally are. Those 10 hours are (used to be, not surw if that changed) calculated on the average of 5 days, by using Saturday as working day on which people are not working the average is calculated based on six days with one day adding 0 hours to tje total. Not sure if that was ever tried in court so.

Disclaimer: The above applies to Germany.

Fun fact: If employees violqte those limits, the line manager is liable personally. That liability includes fines, I know of one case where said fine was 10k Euro, and theoretically even jail time.

You cannot work contract your way around the law. Corporations still try to, even in the EU, but those sections can just be ignored by an employee.

> That is a non-issue regarding privacy

This is definitely not true and results from a limited perspective. How you get that information is important. This is quite difficult to do accurately if we're being honest, and you should work it out (write down how you'd measure it, then determine how to exploit it, then repeat). I think you'll find that the only way to do this results in invasion of privacy.

I'll give a more familiar example of how things that are well intentioned and at first look appear innocuous. We encourage the use of pronouns to correctly address people and give them proper respect (a great goal and something we should always do!). But on the other side, it forces people to pick an identity and draw a very discrete line (as opposed to more flexible boundaries and terms). It does not account for gender fluidity and it forces people to out themselves or hide even more. Which can happen in ways out of their control (e.g. someone else sets up a name tag knowing their preferred pronouns in a setting the person may not want to reveal their identity). Often more important when someone is figuring themselves out.

The problem is not intentions, it is that life is messy. Nothing is monolithic or universal. The best intentions can lead to amplifying the very thing you are trying to prevent/resolve. Another famous example is removing convicted criminal history questions (ban the box) from job applications[0]. Things are complicated and never are like what you assume they are. Simple models aren't good enough and you need to encourage people to stop saying "it's obvious" or "it's simple". It never is and that always leads to harm.

[0] https://econofact.org/the-effects-of-ban-the-box-on-the-empl...

It must akin to the Spanish similar regulation I guess, but the idea is to force employers recognize and pay extra worked hours, not to spy on the employees.

The employer must not under-record the time worked - no one forces them to track the duration of breaks.

Very annoyingly so - it's a nightmare for anyone with flexible hours.

How so. It is not tied to office hours. I am bound to similar process being located in Spain and put my hours whenever they are. My job involve on-call shifts, work with people in different timezones and releases/maintenance out of regular office hours. It works just fine.

The only thing that annoy me is the software my employer chose can only be accesed from inside the corporate network and do not provide a rest api. Otherwise I'd setup a large physical button with a led light connected to a pi zero so I can just hit it on starting and stopping my work.

Why? I can work wehnever I want and always do so. When i worked 50 instead of 40h i get overtime pay.

How? I clock in when I start a work session and clock out when I finish it. It's really just that simple.

it sure forces the issue that most ppl in white-colar jobs dont put in the contracted hours, because of reasons. which was and is fine, but now there is documented lying required, which creates mistrust and vulnerabilty.

Spain too, unfortunately

Actually this is a EU legislation, which forces all member countries to do so.

As a foreign developer living in Austria I'd like to offer a counter perspective: that might be why Austria, even in the tech scene has some of the lowest and least flexibly WFH possibilities I've ever seen in any EU job market: so the bosses can keep a close eye on you at the office, because they can't via SW.

Every job I applied to, even the most liberal ones mandates at least 2 day per week at the office in the best case, with some SW companies having max 1 day per week WFH because "we're more efficient at the office" lol.

Also, many Austrian companies keep rigid track of your time and breaks at the office via electronic card punch in/out systems which are a government mandated legalized forms of workplace surveillance, meaning I have to spend 8h per day at the office regardless of my work being done in 5 and unable to do anything remotely productive for the remaining 3 because my brain is fried, while some companies even make you punch out for coffee breaks so you're not taking a break on your employer's dime, meaning you need to spend even more time at the office what's beyond your legal allowed 30 min lunch break which is also not included in your 8h closely-recorded workday.

So IMHO, it's not all as progresive as you make it sound. It feels like an archaic system designed to keep unionized factory workers strictly in line to their mandated 30 min lunch breaks and making sure no overtime occurs on their shift, but is severely out of place in the world of digital knowledge work where it's used in some companies to keep employees at the office glued for 8 hours to their chairs.

Are you paid by the hour? Any job I've ever had with such rigid time tracking requirements was a hourly paid position.

This sort of thing backfires on the employer in my opinion. It's quite easy to stretch a task to fill 8 hours if you have to be there anyway. But maybe you'd be happy to clock out after 5 hours one day and take a few extra unpaid hours for yourself. If your work is done, the employer should be happy to save a little money and let you do that.

Quite sure he is. Usually All-In contracts don't log their time in Austria.

Nope, regular employee.

All work time is tracked by law in Austria, it's just that all-in is less invasive on the time tracking because it doesn't care for overtime because it's not paid.

Interviewing around Munich and big players have policies between 3 days in the office on the strict end and “please, show sometimes in the office” on easy going end. C’mon, it’s big step forward already from 5 years ago when people had occasionally Fridays home office. However I am stuck in the company with toxic culture from 1995, they really exist! Full back to the office!

I once had an employer, for a short time, that sold a flexible working time model. No clocking of exact hours, back when that was still normal, WFH. The day I started they handed me the detailed docs to sign: core presence hours at the office wherw more than the 40 hours I signed up for (the amounted to basicall, 10 net hours per day), WFH required Managing Director approval and was never granted. The culture was so toxic, no recyvling company wpuld have ever touched it... The head of im-house sales was regularly asked, well more like ordered, to walk the Managing Directors dog... Horrible place.