With the National People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the National Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the General Office of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, Lu Guoquan, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), submitted a "Proposal on Guaranteeing Workers' Right to Offline Rest", which is a proposal to break the "35-year-old workplace threshold" after last year's Two Sessions. Lu Guoquan said that at the national level, legal provisions should be established to protect the right to offline rest to provide legal support for workers to protect their rights.
Do you want to reply to work text messages after work? Similar problems are no longer a problem for many people, because everyone is used to offline overtime. Technological changes in the digital information age continue to blur the boundaries between people's work and life, and hidden overtime has become unscrupulous. Recently, some members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) have called for grassroots workers to "reduce the burden at their fingertips" in order to get rid of the so-called "work traces" of various formalisms, which actually echoes the proposal of "the right to rest offline".
CPPCC members from the All-China Federation of Trade Unions continue to pay attention to the pain points in the workplace and find feasible institutional solutions for them. The differential attitude of social platforms towards the proposal reflects the most realistic sense of powerlessness of ordinary workplace workers: many netizens may support the CPPCC members to advocate for the "right to offline rest", but when they really encounter the reality of the need to assert the right to offline rest, many people will choose to remain silent.
The right to rest, which is the basic right of workers, should undoubtedly be recognized and protected by law, regardless of whether or not it is "mixed" with digital information technology. Even if the words "right to rest offline" are not explicitly written in the specific code, in judicial practice, the judicial attitude towards protecting the basic rights of workers in the new business scene, including rest, is actually clear. Previously, in the face of the controversy of "replying to WeChat after work, whether it counts as overtime", the attitude of relevant judicial practice was also widely praised, and the court further clarified through individual judgments that the use of WeChat after work to pay substantive labor should be recognized as overtime.
However, at the same time, it should also be noted that the determination of online work during rest time should be overtime in individual cases shows a judicial attitude from the perspective of confirmation of labor behavior, which is still different from explicitly supporting the right of employees to choose to protect their rest rights and interests offline during rest time. Another rather embarrassing situation is that whether it is the claim of the fact of "online overtime" or the practice of "refusal of rest time", it may often mean that the specific labor relationship is entering a state of terminal dispute, and it is very rare to claim rights while maintaining the stability of the labor relationship.
CPPCC members strongly advocate that the "right to rest offline" be written into the law as a legal right, which itself is to refine the content of the current right to rest for the protection of workers' rights and interests, and is the proper meaning of legislation as a carrier of value declaration. The legislation clearly states that the "right to offline rest" does not conflict with the fact that in practice workers may easily not claim the relevant rights - since the "right to offline rest" has the hope of becoming a clear legal right, it can be retained or waived, but the law's attitude towards the protection of the relevant rights and interests of workers has always been present and can be asserted at any time.
In fact, when a labor dispute arises, the various legal grounds on which the employee relies to protect his or her rights and interests will most likely not be talked about by the worker from time to time before the dispute occurs. Of course, in the normalization of labor-management negotiations and labor inspection and law enforcement, the law has clear provisions that can still provide more sufficient confidence for them. This also provides more ways to supervise the intervention of law enforcement and supervision for the rights and interests of workers who cannot open their mouths and speak out.
The conclusion of labor relations is itself the result of the continuous game of rights of all parties. That said, even if a single proposal is not enough to bring about a change in the law, there is still a lot of public discussion about the "right to take a break offline". The hardships of ordinary migrant workers should be raised, discussed, and squarely faced in more space, so as to create conditions for the problems to be effectively resolved.