SYDNEY, Aug 26 Reuters Is your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you39;ve left for home?

Australian employees can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a new right to disconnect law designed to curb the creep of work emails and calls into personal lives.

The new rule, which came into force on Monday, means employees, in most cases, cannot be punished for refusing to read or respond to contacts from their employers outside work hours.

Supporters say the law gives workers the confidence to stand up against the steady invasion of their personal lives by work emails, texts and calls, a trend that has accelerated since the COVID19 pandemic scrambled the division between home and work.

Before we had digital technology there was no encroachment, people would go home at the end of a shift and there would be no contact until they returned the following day, said John Hopkins, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology.

Now, globally its the norm to have emails, SMS, phone calls outside those hours, even when on holiday.

Australians worked on average 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023, according to a survey last year by the Australia Institute, which estimated the monetary value of the labour at A130 billion 88 billion.

The changes add Australia to a group of roughly two dozen countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America, which have similar laws.

Pioneer France introduced the rules in 2017 and a…