From Formal Rights to Capabilities: Employee Voice and Well-being under Right-to-Disconnect Legislation

Cherise Regier

Abstract

The expansion of digitally mediated work has intensified concerns about employee availability and working time, particularly in contexts where workers have limited capacity to shape their working conditions. In response, several European countries have introduced right-to-disconnect (R2D) legislation to formally recognize employees’ right to disengage from work-related digital communications outside working hours. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive and uniformly enforced statutory right, R2D legislation often relies on workplace interpretation, negotiation, and implementation. This institutional openness provides a useful opportunity to examine how employee voice operates under conditions of digital connectivity, conceptualizing voice as a capability that enables workers to translate formal rights into meaningful control over their time. Using a difference-in-differences design and focusing on European workers in teleworkable occupations with high exposure to R2D provisions, the analysis shows that well-being improvements following the introduction of R2D legislation are concentrated among workers with greater employee voice.