[quadrifoliate]

> Why is this a government issue at all?

For the same reason anything is a government issue, i.e. that we regulate acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as a society, and periodically adjust what we find acceptable?

If your employer starts dumping large amounts of trash on your property tomorrow and says "oh that's just part of our relationship with you", I bet you'll want to get the government involved real quick because you never agreed to this.

[jackfischer]

The line of what rises to the level of "solve it with force", eg solve it with legal intervention, is understandably blurry. But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so. This OTOH is a private aspect of the employee employer relationship and not exactly a human rights abuse like some of the pearl clutching comments here suggest FWIW writing as someone who went through and goes through very intense on call and all hours availability and firefighting for weeks on end, something I chose voluntarily. I don't want anyone interfering with my ability to choose that and accomplish what we accomplished.

[quadrifoliate]

If you signed a contract to do all-hours firefighting, this still doesn't affect that.

> But in the trash example, if you indeed never agreed to it, that's already a legal issue and rightly so.

That's exactly what this legislation is doing. All it's saying is, if you want off-hours work, make it explicit rather than implicit. If you fire people by expecting firefighting when it's not specified in the contract, you will break the law.

[yusefnapora]

The proposed bill would still allow you to choose to be on-call. Your boss just has to compensate you for your time explicitly when it falls outside of agreed hours, instead of getting an implicit claim to your entire life by virtue of your employment agreement.