If the boss sends messages outside of work, it may be reported

The 3/2018 law on data protection has caused much controversy since its entry into force in December in Spain, because it allows, on paper, electoral propaganda through the mobile phone.

But all is not bad in itself: you should also prevent your supervisor from disturbing you with Whatsapp outside of work hours. This is a detail that had been neglected, but as the lawyer Fabián Valero indicates in a thread, the law now protects the worker who does not want to respond to messages outside of his day to the point that if his superior demands it, he could denounce it and win with relative ease, because that would be a serious sanction.

According to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Article 88 leaves no room for doubt: citizens have the right to digital disconnection in the workplace. Employers would be forced to draft an internal policy to ensure that workers respect this situation and, even if you work outside the office, you should be left alone at the end of your work.

This last point is of particular importance, as Valero says, because companies are now obliged not only to have a digital disconnection protocol, but also to train and educate them.

The problem with this legislation is that it does not prevent an employer from writing something, but with the law in hand, the employee can ignore this message until the next day.

The new Spanish legislation is reminiscent of the French case, which introduced in 2017 new guidelines to facilitate disconnection out of work. Among some of the new rules, it is stipulated that the employer and the employee can negotiate the mobile work situation outside working hours.

Work relationships have evolved a lot thanks to applications such as WhatsApp or Slack, which, far from easing the operations of an activity, keep workers connected constantly because they have applications of these services installed on the mobile.

WhatsApp is slow to develop a "vacation mode" to partially avoid this problem. On paper, users who activate this mode will not receive any notification from the groups they selected during the specified time period.

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