We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
Some of my friends tend to put America’s founding fathers up on a pedestal, on account of a couple of cleverly written (but challenging to decipher) documents, including the ‘Declaration of Independence’. I’ve often been stymied by the phrase “certain unalienable Rights” — which seems to suggest that “all men” have certain Rights, but aliens don’t have them? When we read the history books, however, we find scant evidence that the founding fathers even believed in aliens. Thus, the confusion.
We note, meanwhile, that the founding fathers listed only three Rights as being unalienable. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Perhaps it’s finally come time to pull the Declaration down off its pedestal, and remedy a crucial omission — by adding a very modern, but nevertheless indispensable, unalienable Right — namely, the Right to Disconnect. (I am assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that the Right to Disconnect is unalienable. I might be wrong. I have been wrong before. Like, that time back in 1991.)
This simple amendment to the Declaration of Independence — the Right to Disconnect — would allow us to keep up with the Joneses.
That is to say, to keep up with the French. Because let me assure you, we are not keeping up.
We ought to be ashamed, letting the French get ahead of us. A little over four years ago, the French government — which, by the way, has never even bothered to declare its independence — passed a law that gives French workers the unalienable right to disconnect their phone and other devices when they are not “working”. As we’ve seen here in the USA, workers — especially tech workers — are often expected to respond to company-related emails and phone messages even when they’re “off the clock” — late at night, on the weekend, or while on vacation.
Not so French workers. Not only is their right to disconnect their phones unalienable… they’re not even required to speak English, if they do answer a call.
Myriam El Khomri, the French minister of labor at the time the new law was passed, justified the Right to Disconnect as a necessary step to “reduce burnout”… (“réduire l’épuisement professionnel”… literally, “to reduce professional exhaustion” — as distinct from “amateur exhaustion”, apparently.)
Discussing the need for the law, minister El Khomri noted “the boundary between professional and personal life has become tenuous.” This was, as we said, a few years ago. Since the arrival of COVID-19 here in the US, the boundary between professional and personal life has become not only tenuous — it’s become downright non-existent for many of us, because we don’t even have jobs any more. But the lucky essential workers who are still punching the clock on behalf of the rest of us, should not be answering company phone calls or emails during their free time. Assuming they have any free time.
If anyone should be considered unalienable, it’s essential workers.
But has our US government done anything about this?
The Italian government made the Right to Disconnect unalienable in 2017, as the French had done in 2016. Spain passed the same kind of law in 2018. (And, like the French, neither the Italians nor the Spanish governments ever wrote a Declaration of Independence. Are we starting to see a pattern here?)
To help prove, scientifically, the need for this unalienable Right, a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, hooked up forty office workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for almost two weeks, and recorded the subjects’ heart-rate variability — a common technique for measuring mental stress. They also monitored the employees’ computer use, which allowed them to correlate e-mail checks with stress levels.
What they found would not surprise the French. “The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour,” the authors concluded.
Their recommendation? To “suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.”
Daily Post readers who’ve tried to read my past humor columns may have noticed that I’m sometimes skeptical of scientific experiments. In this case — hooking up forty office workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for almost two weeks, and then checking their heart rates while they’re reading their emails — I don’t need a wireless heart-rate monitor to know that I’m excited when someone actually responds to the dozens of emails I send out every day, trying to make some kind of human connection in the midst of a pandemic. If the researchers want to label it “stress”, and they believe that’s somehow scientific, more power to them. I would be more likely to call it “desperation.”
Isn’t anybody out there? Can I get some kind of response?
I assure you, I would be totally excited if my boss tried to reach me while I’m sitting on a beach in Costa Rica. (Wearing my wireless heart-rate monitor, of course.)
“I’m finally getting around to responding to that question you emailed me four weeks ago…” my boss would probably say.
Who wouldn’t be excited?
But no one is talking about the unalienable Right to Connect.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.