Right to Disconnect 2024 and GPS off-hours tracking: complying with FW Amendment Act

Your operations director rings a Melbourne supervisor at half past nine in the evening to demand the next day’s roster. The supervisor declines, on the basis of the Right to Disconnect, refers the matter to the union, and within a week the company is in the Fair Work Commission facing a Right to Disconnect order application. If the order is made it applies to the whole workforce, and the dispute is already being noticed in the trade press. One phone call, made at the wrong hour, has become a company-wide matter of public record.

The director was not being cruel. The roster genuinely was needed. But the Right to Disconnect does not turn on whether the contact felt reasonable to the person making it. It turns on something more structured, and worth understanding before nine-thirty rolls around again.

The Right to Disconnect, in plain terms

The Fair Work Amendment that introduced the Right to Disconnect commenced in 2024 for medium and large employers and a year later for small ones. It gives an employee the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from the employer outside the employee’s working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. The right is now part of the Fair Work Act, not a guideline, and that distinction is the whole point.

Reasonableness is assessed against a defined set of criteria: the reason for the contact, the way it is made, the disruption it causes the employee, whether the employee is compensated for being available, and the employee’s role and personal circumstances. The Fair Work Commission can make orders to stop unreasonable contact, and a breach of such an order is a civil contravention with a penalty attached. And it does not sit alone: the general protections regime already prohibits adverse action against a worker for exercising a workplace right, so an employer who disciplines someone for declining out-of-hours contact may have committed two breaches with one reaction. The exposure compounds.

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Where a workforce platform quietly creates the problem

Here is the part operators do not expect. A GPS workforce platform that pings workers outside their rostered hours, or that asks the worker to do something in the app after the shift has ended, can itself amount to attempted contact. The platform you installed to keep things tidy can become the thing generating the breach, quietly, in the background, at the rate of one notification a night.

The fix has two parts. The first is to default to no notifications outside rostered hours, with the worker’s own roster window acting as the silence boundary. The second is that where a genuine operational need does require out-of-hours contact, an incident, a safety alert, an urgent rota change, the platform captures the reason and the response, building the evidentiary record the Commission will want to see if the contact is later challenged. The pattern that breaks the right is the familiar one: the supervisor messaging at ten to confirm tomorrow’s roster, the dispatch system sending location pings after clock-off, the data request landing in an inbox at midnight. Each is a separate issue, and each is preventable with a little platform discipline.

What counts as reasonable contact

The Commission has indicated, through the early case law and the guidance, that out-of-hours contact stays reasonable when it is genuinely urgent, when the worker is on call and paid for that availability, or when the worker holds a senior role where availability is built into the compensation. It becomes unreasonable when it is routine, when it could comfortably have been handled during working hours, or when it is out of all proportion to the operational need behind it.

The platform’s job is to enforce that distinction at the technical level, where it actually holds. A supervisor who tries to ping a worker at ten in the evening meets a confirmation prompt: this message will reach the worker outside rostered hours, do you want to proceed, and what is the reason? The friction is deliberate. Most attempts, faced with that small question, get rerouted to the morning on their own. The few that genuinely must go out carry their operational reason logged beside them, defensible if anyone ever asks.

The cost of getting it wrong

A Right to Disconnect order from the Commission applies to the workplace, is enforceable as a civil contravention, and becomes a permanent matter of public record. That last point is a consequence in its own right: industrial-relations watchers follow these matters, and a company on the order list is a company under extra scrutiny from then on, by unions, by journalists, by the next worker with a grievance.

The platform that stops the right from being breached in the first place is the platform that never appears on that list. GeoTapp’s notification engine respects rostered hours by default, asks for the operational reason when out-of-hours contact is genuinely needed, and produces the audit log that defends the contact if a worker contests it. Start a free fourteen-day trial, with no card, and make the half-past-nine phone call something your systems quietly discourage.

Does your workforce app go quiet when the shift ends, or does it carry on pinging? Tell us in the comments below. Most operators have never checked, and what you write helps others look before a half-past-nine call turns into a Commission file.