As a portuguese, while this looks good on paper, it won't contribute whatsoever to our current situation.
We're a country where the nationals earn like shit - probably one of the worst avg and median incomes in whole EU - and are choked to the brink of passing out by high taxes.
Our political class is exchanging our young and bright over to foreign pensioners, and now apparently, foreign remote workers.
Just so you understand the status quo: people were being pushed out of big cities for years, and now with remote work even more people are being pushed out of medium sized cities in the interior, because everyone wants to live in the country side or by the shore.
We're fucked in every direction by high rents, high real-estate, high taxes, high energy costs, yet our incomes remain shit.
In 20 years you'll probably see the news headline:
"Workers in Portugal now must work until the age of 75 so they could see a healthier work-life balance under new labor laws!"
I live partially in Germany and Portugal, as I have roots in both country. You are right, the average salaries are a joke and the living costs are sky rocketing. However, you have a great and stable society, a really specific market, good universities and sometimes I think what is missing is initiative. The young people prefer to go abroad than try to innovate in Portugal. For example, almost all disrupting startups in Portugal are lead by Brazilians. Sometimes I have the impression that we all forgot about our resilience (well described by Camoes and Pessoa).
You're 100% right - though I don't think it's easy to risk it in Portugal, neither it's praised.
I think our worst problem is that the majority seems to be ok giving the appearance that they're ok in life. I can't blame them, like some said: we have good weather and good food... low cost flights allows us to travel and post on social media showing we're going places... so in reality it seems like everything is ok.
Yet it's not.
Agostinho da Silva might say we're fulfilling our destiny of being "vadios" and artists, since he claims that's a way of living very rooted in our culture, waiting for machines to come do the work for ourselves. If that time will ever come, will be pros.
I tried my own venture, and failed. In fact I've tried many things and failed at them. And I do wonder sometimes, what's the point?
I always fold to play guitar, sketch, and have laughs with friends while we eat a home made meal.
Steep bell curve for everyone beneath them to be in eastern europe while Portugal is surrounded by or in close proximity to the highest percentile earners in Western Europe
I was born in Brazil but I am currently in process to try to get a Portuguese citizenship (my ancestors are portuguese and raised me to be portuguese, I was only born in Brazil).
I am considering moving to portugal even, but I must say I was shocked when I saw that income taxes for me would be 45%? And I was thinking I pay too much in Brazil at 27.5%...
Are portuguese services really, really good at least? (in Brazil the services are not very good, we pay taxes + private education, private healthcare, private security, and the government expects private sector to build railways, etc... hell, some places people have private army too, with some parts of the country you being safe only if you bribe the army itself or hire mercenaries...)
>Are portuguese services really, really good at least?
That's problem: they're not. Or better yet, they're very inefficient and rely too much on humans. Our public Health Care Service (SNS) is praised in some circles - but at the cost of poor wages and overworked staff. Not to mention the interior is starting to crumble with no people to make up for it.
> my ancestors are portuguese and raised me to be portuguese, > I was only born in Brazil
You are 100% Brazilian. Your ancestors, knew a Portugal from 100 years ago. It is the same with the japanese Dekasegi.
Portugal is awesome, IMO the best country in the world, but you will definitely have a lower life standard there. If you are married, expect a lot of "saudades de casa".
Taxes are extremely high and that, in and of itself, is a huge issue but things are actually much worse.
Want to use a road? You pay. Want to get some financial documents you actually need for work? You pay. Want a doctor to see you at a hospital? You pay.
> and are choked to the brink of passing out by high taxes
What are property taxes like over there?
I'm suspicious that your problem is the same as California, New Zealand, Canada and everyone else: deep tax cuts for long time landowners which everyone else has to make up for.
Calm down. Yes, some things are shit in Portugal. €0.2246 per kWh is not cheap but it is not crazy high.
"Renewables account for 72% of Portugal's consumption in 5-mo 2021" May be important for the future
I know real estate prices in Portugal are crazy. 500k in a city and you get a golden visa. Hence every decent apartment is 500k or more. In a country were the minimum salary is around 500 euros.
Look the the future. Portugal can and is attracting an nearly infinite supply of young people from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique. The future is good. Likely better than Italy.
Property prices aren't so crazy - a friend of mine pays €400 a month in a nice part of Costa da Caparica for a 2 bed, another bought a great place for under €200k in Cacilhas.
For under €500k you can get something like this https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/31578168/ more than decent in such a desirable location in the centre of the capital..
The minimum wage is so low because more than 50% of the workforce didn't finish school https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/50-of-portuguese-betwee...
There are plenty of Portuguese people smarter than I commanding nice salaries, yes not as high as elsewhere in Europe but the quality of life and cost of living I believe make up for it.
Another thing (besides high taxes and low wages) US leftists would like to copy from Portugal is complete legalization of all drugs, including the hard/addictive ones. I'd be curious to know from a local how well that worked (if at all) over the extended period of time.
We didn't legalize drugs, we decriminalized them - basically a drug addict wasn't considered a criminal, but someone who's sick and needs help.
It worked wonders, we had a heroin epidemic that vanished in the course of 10-15 years. There are still addicts of course, but they're being followed by doctors, offered replacement drugs, etc.
Just to contrast: you used to see people injecting themselves on their dicks in the street all over Lisbon, yet more prevalent in some neighborhoods. Such sights are long gone.
Those pensioners aren't the ones who will pay Social Security in the future mate. Portuguese politicians are digging a hole that we won't be able to recover from - just so you know the age of retirement keeps increasing with no end in sight.
Yes, fine if those pensioners move to Portugal permanently. If they're just living there during the summer then the place is dead for the rest of the year, and locals are priced out of staying there.
>> Our political class is exchanging our young and bright
>...who would be unemployed.
presumably the "young and bright" that are moving out of portugal aren't doing so they can be unemployed in another country. if anything they're retaining the unemployed/unemployable young adults but offloading the employable young adults.
This is a product of socialism without protections. Put simply, you have high taxes to redistribute wealth. Unfortunately, the government takes their cut. As government becomes increasingly large / naturally corrupt that cut becomes larger.
The wealthy can leave and gain more else-where and many leave. Increasing the burden. If you don't have heavy border controls, people who are less advantaged move to the country to gain from the social system. You'll also have remote workers move into cities because it is cheaper than their home region. This drives up costs in cities, but isn't enough tax revenue to offset the loss in wealthy people leaving, as it's highly focused. You'll also have people investing and buying property, which also drives up the costs.
At the end of the day, if you want to improve life, you have to focus on
(a) strict immigration policies (reducing pressure from immigrants)
We tend to talk about "socialism" in Portugal, but few countries that I know are more neoliberal than Portugal. Almost everything is private or is managed by private companies. Portugal is one of the few countries which exchanges visa for money. Our approach to Uber and Airbnd was until 2019, pretty liberal. I'm not saying that is right or wrong, just that even though the people vote for socialism, what we get in the end is neoliberalism.
> This is a product of socialism without protections. Put simply, you have high taxes to redistribute wealth. Unfortunately, the government takes their cut. As government becomes increasingly large / naturally corrupt that cut becomes larger.
To blame this on socialism proves you don't know the history of Portugal.
There are a few other interesting things mentioned in the article:
> Employers are also forbidden from monitoring their employees while they work at home.
I'm wondering what that includes - any software that tracks mouse movement, applications used etc? Or is it limited in its scope? Anyway, sounds like a win and I hope other countries do that too.
> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.
I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory
> [parents] now have the right to work from home without having to arrange it in advance with their employers
Another win, though I'm wondering about the scope - who does it apply to? All office workers? Is there some definition of jobs where the work can be done remotely without limitations (e.g. having to use some machines available only at the work place)?
> Companies must also now contribute to expenses that workers have incurred as a result of switching to remote working
That's cool. I've seen companies already doing it in The Netherlands, but I don't know if it's regulated in any way, for now it seems companies come up with some arbitrary numbers between 40eur and 70eur a month.
All in all, it's hard to say how some of these rules will be implemented and enforced, but I like the direction it's going. Portugal becomes one of top places to attract remote workers in Europe with it's low (for now) prices, friendly taxes, great climate and good level of English spoken in the cities.
>> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.
> I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory
I was probably deemed unnecessary to write this down in law since the company is already forbidden to contact employees outside of work hours.
Now we just need to be competitive enough to have decent wages.
Else those remote works are just going to increase even more housing costs (both rent/real estate), and keep funneling cash to what has proven to be our greatest weakness: tourism.
> Else those remote works are just going to increase even more housing costs (both rent/real estate)
I'm not sure that's true. Remote work does not require workers to be at commute distance from anywhere, and it only requires them to have a reliable internet connection. Everyone I know who switched to remote work moved out of city centers and into places where both rent was lower and quality of life was higher.
What exactly leads you to believe that fleeing tech hubs and urban centers leads to higher rents?
If companies can’t monitor employees working from home how do they protect against malware? Does every employee now bear responsibility for keeping their system secure? If they cause a data breach because they didn’t update their system could they be liable?
>If companies can’t monitor employees working from home how do they protect against malware?
WTF ? if you as a company want protection againt malware then give me a super locked down work machine, where I can't install shit and updates will be done automatically?
If I work remote and I am using my own hardware then fuck you, I don't install your malware on my own machine so you can check my personal stuff.
So give me a lockeddown work machine if I have some super secret project that I work on. If you don't trust me and think I will screenshot your secrets then maybe is better we end this. I work from home for more then 10 years, it is all based on trust and progress tracking, but I don't work with super secret stuff, just the average proprietary SPAs(or desktop apps in the past).
What does monitoring have to do with malware? IT departments can setup automatic updating so employee equipment fetches and installs updates from the departments servers, and the "service" running on the employees machine doesn't have to send out monitoring data in order to facilitate this.
Or is it essential to monitor the employee in order to prevent malware for some reason I'm too inexperienced to see?
> Building a healthy remote working culture could also bring other benefits to Portugal, Mendes Godinho said, in the form of foreign remote workers seeking a change of scenery.
> "We consider Portugal one of the best places in the world for these digital nomads and remote workers to choose to live in, we want to attract them to Portugal," she told the Web Summit audience.
Portugal has form in this regard. If it sets out to do this at a national level, it will likely actually deliver.
It has already succeeded in making itself a great place for other nationals to retire to, for example. Portugal has deliberately arranged its tax system to attract pensioners, and done big sales pushes.
And it works. Lots of Swedish pensioners, for example, receive a Swedish state pension but spend that money in their new retirement home in Portugal.
Yeah, and now Sweden is/was considering limiting this as it considers Portugal a tax haven for their nationals. This (and previous) government can suck balls. They don't give a shit about the actual portuguese living here. High tax rates, shitty public services, but if they can attract any foreign money to look good, fuck the portuguese.
And don't get me started on how these foreigners that get tax exempt status drive up prices of everything here (ps: no problem with foreigners per se, just the ones that get special tax status). Had French and Italian people here literally tell me that what they save in taxes with these schemes basically pays for the house, so they don't mind paying more for the houses (I worked with some real estate companies)
Finland even complained that some double taxation laws were depriving the Finish state of taxes, and then Portugal didn't collect them either, creating a loophole. They will start to collect them anyway from their retirees.
> (...) nationals get one of the highest tax rates in Europe[0] and foreigners get a tax haven!
Why is this bad? If foreigners don't move to Portugal then they contribute zero in taxes and to the economy. If the Portuguese government convinces people to move to Portugal with tax benefits, they will pay taxes and spend their income in the local economy.
This shouldn't be an example to anyone. This isn't a real measure, wasn't thought or anything. This is a law made by politicians who are in campaign for the election in january.
Does this really help anyone? Most of the laws this government made didn't help anyone, at all. They just make the people's lives worse with their "good intentions".
Just a reminder that Portugal has some of the lowest wages in Europe, minimum wage is 600 Euro/month. Strict laws to protect workers is great until there are no evil employers left to employ anyone.
How do you even get this number? Even if I only count actual EU member (exclude Norway) that have numbers for 2020 Portugal ends up 15th, when Ireland and Italy publish their data it will be 17th.
Also is this purchasing power adjusted? If not probably it’s even lower since East European countries tend to have lower cost of living.
600e minimum sounds good when you live in a country also in Europe where the average is 500e, and that average is fake because there are a lot unregistered workers working illegally for smaller amounts.
Workplaces not bugging employees after hours is a great rule of thumb, but blanket rules don't leave room for people to use their judgement to resolve (hopefully very rare) legitimate emergencies and problems.
It's probably tied to their actual work agreement/contract.
If one of your explicit work requirements is to be on-call, then it's likely fine. That way employees can also argue that they should get paid for that time as well (and usually, on-call agreements also have compensation rules as well).
If you can refuse the on-call agreement and still keep your job, then it is okay. Otherwise, it is an option for employers to take away their employees' free time as they wish.
The cost of my time as an employee is not linear. Just because I am selling 8 hours of my time for X money, doesn't meant I would be happy to sell 16 hours for 2X money. And if I am taking a week of a vacation, it means I want to relax and walk somewhere in nature and be left alone. If you want someone available 365 days a year, hire two people.
> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.
I genuinely don’t get this. It seems completely backwards.
Surely your boss should have the right to contact you, but you should have the right not to answer until your working hours recommence?
Is Portugal deciding that the very act of sending a message creates some kind of coercive pressure to work?
If so, why did they decide against the “right to disconnect”?
The problem as I see it is that it can put you at an unfair disadvantage to your team-mates who might choose to reply to your boss, or even do that "urgent thing" that your boss wants. Now you're suddenly the employee who chose not to "dedicate" extra 15 mins of your time to that "important" project. There should not be this kind of competition outside of working hours. Free time and family life should be protected.
I don’t buy it. This law doesn’t prevent competition outside working hours. The employee who wants to be seen to go “above and beyond” doesn’t need a time-specific prompting message to decide to work an extra 15 minutes.
The boss can easily make it known that those extra 15 minutes would be rewarded, either by dropping an email at 4:59pm, or using management clichés like “going the extra mile” and “taking one for the team”, or worse, manipulative non-verbal techniques that give advantage to in-groups and create barriers to out-groups.
> I suspect the real problem is exactly here not on large companies.
Small companies usually can't risk burning out their staff - for large companies, churn is priced in everywhere, but a small company can easily run aground when the wrong employee leaves.
This amendment targets precisely large companies who abuse churn to save money.
It’s not about “risking burning out the employees”. Small companies simply don’t have a chain of command and employees are taking on so many mission-critical things at once that employers need them to be constantly available.
I worked at a startup as an engineer and was the most technical person at the company. My personal life was not respected by the CEO because I was the only one who could navigate the 2am calls with the overseas manufacturers. I ended up quitting my job because of that, but someone more desperate for work than me would have probably taken that abuse for a lot longer, at the detriment of their mental health.
Readit News
We're a country where the nationals earn like shit - probably one of the worst avg and median incomes in whole EU - and are choked to the brink of passing out by high taxes.
Our political class is exchanging our young and bright over to foreign pensioners, and now apparently, foreign remote workers.
Just so you understand the status quo: people were being pushed out of big cities for years, and now with remote work even more people are being pushed out of medium sized cities in the interior, because everyone wants to live in the country side or by the shore.
We're fucked in every direction by high rents, high real-estate, high taxes, high energy costs, yet our incomes remain shit.
In 20 years you'll probably see the news headline:
"Workers in Portugal now must work until the age of 75 so they could see a healthier work-life balance under new labor laws!"
To all my Portuguese friends:
"Viver não é necessário. Necessário é criar."
Fernando Pessoa
I think our worst problem is that the majority seems to be ok giving the appearance that they're ok in life. I can't blame them, like some said: we have good weather and good food... low cost flights allows us to travel and post on social media showing we're going places... so in reality it seems like everything is ok.
Yet it's not.
Agostinho da Silva might say we're fulfilling our destiny of being "vadios" and artists, since he claims that's a way of living very rooted in our culture, waiting for machines to come do the work for ourselves. If that time will ever come, will be pros.
I tried my own venture, and failed. In fact I've tried many things and failed at them. And I do wonder sometimes, what's the point?
I always fold to play guitar, sketch, and have laughs with friends while we eat a home made meal.
https://taxfoundation.org/comparing-corporate-tax-systems-eu...
and actually there's very little initiative there too,
seen it too many times, comfortable at parents place / not desperate, why bother going abroad
https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKM...
It sounds like a good piece of legislation. The rest needs to be fixed of course but that shouldn't stop all positive change.
I am considering moving to portugal even, but I must say I was shocked when I saw that income taxes for me would be 45%? And I was thinking I pay too much in Brazil at 27.5%...
Are portuguese services really, really good at least? (in Brazil the services are not very good, we pay taxes + private education, private healthcare, private security, and the government expects private sector to build railways, etc... hell, some places people have private army too, with some parts of the country you being safe only if you bribe the army itself or hire mercenaries...)
That's problem: they're not. Or better yet, they're very inefficient and rely too much on humans. Our public Health Care Service (SNS) is praised in some circles - but at the cost of poor wages and overworked staff. Not to mention the interior is starting to crumble with no people to make up for it.
You are 100% Brazilian. Your ancestors, knew a Portugal from 100 years ago. It is the same with the japanese Dekasegi.
Portugal is awesome, IMO the best country in the world, but you will definitely have a lower life standard there. If you are married, expect a lot of "saudades de casa".
Only if you earn the same as the prime-minister, I think that's the top marginal rate.
Want to use a road? You pay. Want to get some financial documents you actually need for work? You pay. Want a doctor to see you at a hospital? You pay.
You pay for everything twice.
My dad grew up under Salazar, they didn't even have school past 3rd grade, everything was underfunded as hell, it was basically a corporate oligarchy.
What are property taxes like over there?
I'm suspicious that your problem is the same as California, New Zealand, Canada and everyone else: deep tax cuts for long time landowners which everyone else has to make up for.
"Renewables account for 72% of Portugal's consumption in 5-mo 2021" May be important for the future
I know real estate prices in Portugal are crazy. 500k in a city and you get a golden visa. Hence every decent apartment is 500k or more. In a country were the minimum salary is around 500 euros.
Look the the future. Portugal can and is attracting an nearly infinite supply of young people from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique. The future is good. Likely better than Italy.
There are plenty of Portuguese people smarter than I commanding nice salaries, yes not as high as elsewhere in Europe but the quality of life and cost of living I believe make up for it.
Deleted Comment
It worked wonders, we had a heroin epidemic that vanished in the course of 10-15 years. There are still addicts of course, but they're being followed by doctors, offered replacement drugs, etc.
Just to contrast: you used to see people injecting themselves on their dicks in the street all over Lisbon, yet more prevalent in some neighborhoods. Such sights are long gone.
...who would be unemployed.
> over to foreign pensioners, and now apparently, foreign remote workers.
...who already have and income and are happy to spend it in Portugal.
Not a terrible deal.
It should be the other way around.
>...who would be unemployed.
presumably the "young and bright" that are moving out of portugal aren't doing so they can be unemployed in another country. if anything they're retaining the unemployed/unemployable young adults but offloading the employable young adults.
The wealthy can leave and gain more else-where and many leave. Increasing the burden. If you don't have heavy border controls, people who are less advantaged move to the country to gain from the social system. You'll also have remote workers move into cities because it is cheaper than their home region. This drives up costs in cities, but isn't enough tax revenue to offset the loss in wealthy people leaving, as it's highly focused. You'll also have people investing and buying property, which also drives up the costs.
At the end of the day, if you want to improve life, you have to focus on
(a) strict immigration policies (reducing pressure from immigrants)
(b) strict import controls (raising internal wages)
(c) reduce social system, focus on citizens and potentially reduce general services
(d) reduce taxes on income, land and sales
(e) increase import taxes and potentially tax on foreigners
If you do the above, it'll reduce the burden on the individuals and protect & improve the internal labor market.
You can tax the SHIT out of people if they think they get something in return.
To blame this on socialism proves you don't know the history of Portugal.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
> Employers are also forbidden from monitoring their employees while they work at home.
I'm wondering what that includes - any software that tracks mouse movement, applications used etc? Or is it limited in its scope? Anyway, sounds like a win and I hope other countries do that too.
> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.
I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory
> [parents] now have the right to work from home without having to arrange it in advance with their employers
Another win, though I'm wondering about the scope - who does it apply to? All office workers? Is there some definition of jobs where the work can be done remotely without limitations (e.g. having to use some machines available only at the work place)?
> Companies must also now contribute to expenses that workers have incurred as a result of switching to remote working
That's cool. I've seen companies already doing it in The Netherlands, but I don't know if it's regulated in any way, for now it seems companies come up with some arbitrary numbers between 40eur and 70eur a month.
All in all, it's hard to say how some of these rules will be implemented and enforced, but I like the direction it's going. Portugal becomes one of top places to attract remote workers in Europe with it's low (for now) prices, friendly taxes, great climate and good level of English spoken in the cities.
> I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory
I was probably deemed unnecessary to write this down in law since the company is already forbidden to contact employees outside of work hours.
Else those remote works are just going to increase even more housing costs (both rent/real estate), and keep funneling cash to what has proven to be our greatest weakness: tourism.
I'm not sure that's true. Remote work does not require workers to be at commute distance from anywhere, and it only requires them to have a reliable internet connection. Everyone I know who switched to remote work moved out of city centers and into places where both rent was lower and quality of life was higher.
What exactly leads you to believe that fleeing tech hubs and urban centers leads to higher rents?
What about the savings? No pricey lunchtime sandwiches or commuting expenses. I don't think the above is fair.
I believe worker can still be contacted in case of an emergency.
WTF ? if you as a company want protection againt malware then give me a super locked down work machine, where I can't install shit and updates will be done automatically?
If I work remote and I am using my own hardware then fuck you, I don't install your malware on my own machine so you can check my personal stuff.
So give me a lockeddown work machine if I have some super secret project that I work on. If you don't trust me and think I will screenshot your secrets then maybe is better we end this. I work from home for more then 10 years, it is all based on trust and progress tracking, but I don't work with super secret stuff, just the average proprietary SPAs(or desktop apps in the past).
Or is it essential to monitor the employee in order to prevent malware for some reason I'm too inexperienced to see?
> "We consider Portugal one of the best places in the world for these digital nomads and remote workers to choose to live in, we want to attract them to Portugal," she told the Web Summit audience.
Portugal has form in this regard. If it sets out to do this at a national level, it will likely actually deliver.
It has already succeeded in making itself a great place for other nationals to retire to, for example. Portugal has deliberately arranged its tax system to attract pensioners, and done big sales pushes.
And it works. Lots of Swedish pensioners, for example, receive a Swedish state pension but spend that money in their new retirement home in Portugal.
And don't get me started on how these foreigners that get tax exempt status drive up prices of everything here (ps: no problem with foreigners per se, just the ones that get special tax status). Had French and Italian people here literally tell me that what they save in taxes with these schemes basically pays for the house, so they don't mind paying more for the houses (I worked with some real estate companies)
https://algarvedailynews.com/news/14974-swedes-in-portugal-f...
The country where nationals get one of the highest tax rates in Europe[0] and foreigners get a tax haven!
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/personal-income-tax-rates-europe/
Why is this bad? If foreigners don't move to Portugal then they contribute zero in taxes and to the economy. If the Portuguese government convinces people to move to Portugal with tax benefits, they will pay taxes and spend their income in the local economy.
Isn't that all laws? The next election campaign starts the second once the current election results are final.
Deleted Comment
https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKM...
Also is this purchasing power adjusted? If not probably it’s even lower since East European countries tend to have lower cost of living.
If one of your explicit work requirements is to be on-call, then it's likely fine. That way employees can also argue that they should get paid for that time as well (and usually, on-call agreements also have compensation rules as well).
The cost of my time as an employee is not linear. Just because I am selling 8 hours of my time for X money, doesn't meant I would be happy to sell 16 hours for 2X money. And if I am taking a week of a vacation, it means I want to relax and walk somewhere in nature and be left alone. If you want someone available 365 days a year, hire two people.
I genuinely don’t get this. It seems completely backwards.
Surely your boss should have the right to contact you, but you should have the right not to answer until your working hours recommence?
Is Portugal deciding that the very act of sending a message creates some kind of coercive pressure to work?
If so, why did they decide against the “right to disconnect”?
The boss can easily make it known that those extra 15 minutes would be rewarded, either by dropping an email at 4:59pm, or using management clichés like “going the extra mile” and “taking one for the team”, or worse, manipulative non-verbal techniques that give advantage to in-groups and create barriers to out-groups.
I suspect the real problem is exactly here not on large companies.
Small companies usually can't risk burning out their staff - for large companies, churn is priced in everywhere, but a small company can easily run aground when the wrong employee leaves.
This amendment targets precisely large companies who abuse churn to save money.
I worked at a startup as an engineer and was the most technical person at the company. My personal life was not respected by the CEO because I was the only one who could navigate the 2am calls with the overseas manufacturers. I ended up quitting my job because of that, but someone more desperate for work than me would have probably taken that abuse for a lot longer, at the detriment of their mental health.