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.
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.
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.