I suppose you could always ignore after-hours calls from work - boss or otherwise - but the fallout would unfortunately have been pretty predictable.
Good news all round. Fuck doing work outside the paid window. Unless it’s a dire personal emergency for one of my staff, then fine - but damn right I’m taking a half hour flyer one day in the week.
If they aren’t in the contract, and don’t get paid at after-hours rates, ignoring them is always the right call. You’re either on call, and paid for it, or you aren’t. The alternative, is slavery.
On the other hand, if you work remote freelance, “after hours” becomes more of a nebulous concept, with calls and meetings being either scheduled or unscheduled. Unscheduled ones are fair to get ignored for up to 12 hours, with “send me an email” being also a good response.
The problem is, that many employees are not in a position to ignore their bosses. Making it downright illegal to call after-hours is the only way to enforce this.
Not sure how it works in Australia, but in countries with minimally decent worker rights protection, refusing to do any work that isn’t in the contract, is not valid grounds for dismissal. As in, the boss might dismiss the employee for refusing to slave away, but they’ll have to pay severance, and the ex-employee will get some unemployment pay for some time.
In theory.
Any boss with half a brain will find other ways to either fire that person, make their life miserable, or simply make it very clear, that they’re not going to get any promotions, pay rises, etc. from them.
A bad boss can make your life hell, complete within his rights.
In countries with worker rights protections, there tend to be worker unions which reach common agreements with encoded pay raises (“or else” in the form of strikes), while worker discrimination is either directly punishable, or grounds to nullify a dismissal. There are plenty of bosses with precisely “half a brain”, who’ve discovered the hard way that it would’ve been cheaper to just pay the severance and be done with it.
Then of course you have places with “at will employment”, or more feudal-like structures. Not sure where Australia falls along those lines.
I think, you completely misunderstand how jobs work for most people.
Your direct boss most likely can’t fire you directly, but they assign you work. There’s tons of boring, mind numbing work nobody wants to do. Guess who just volunteered for that? Same is true for shift planning. Just assigning you the shitty shifts nobody wants to do is perfectly legal. Even just completely ignoring you as a person is possible, and will grind you down.
You won’t get a union to go on strike for that. And where is it (legally!) discrimination? Someone has to do the shift, after all!
You can rave about unions and laws all you want, but being an asshole is not illegal, so if your boss acts like one, there’s nothing you can do.
I know how jobs work, including to the point of requiring an employee to sit out their hours staring at a wall with nothing to do.
What I also know, is that whatever contract you signed, along with any labor laws, is the rule. If you get asked anything outside of your contract (think thrice before signing one), or against the union agreement, or in contradiction with labor laws, your boss can go pound sand.
being an asshole is not illegal
Depending on where you live, and how much of an asshole, it can be deemed illegal workplace abuse.
There are also other means: right now in Spain, we have a case where the chief of the maternity ER of a hospital got dismissed for abusive behavior… he sued and won, getting readmitted… which subsequently made every worker in the ER take a sick leave, grinding the ER to a halt. Just today, news came out that he’s been fired. So much for legally being an asshole.
Getting paid for on-call hours would be cool. If only.
A few public sector organisations have had a compromise, where you get an hourly rate and a phone to be on-call. It’s something daft like two pounds per hour, but it does work out to be an extra £100 or £150 a month before tax with attendance expenses paid if you needed to get onsite.
There was probably a compensation arrangement too but I just took off the time that I worked at my convenience - generally the following day in the morning for a lie-in.
