Boss demands employee to give them their personal phone number so that they can contact them after work hours and just use that form of contact: ‘This is crazy, right?’ – FAIL Blog

As if working 9-hour shifts wasn’t enough.

Some bosses are starting to demand more and more from their employees, as if they were overachieving machines that can’t stop for a second. They already check if the status in Teams is always green, which is over-controlling in its final form. But now they are also requesting your personal phone number so they can call you anytime they need you, even if it’s outside of your working hours. That is completely insane for several reasons. Firstly, nothing is so urgent to need to contact an employee on a Sunday or when they take vacations. Secondly, it proves that this is just another way of micromanaging that, instead of focusing on the amount of work done, it deems more important the fact that the employee is ALWAYS available. And lastly, it is another way of exploitation to have workers work even more while still getting paid the same salary each month. 

This Reddit story got me thinking about how much everything has changed in the last decade. Before, it was unthinkable to pretend that an employee was available after their shift. Maybe all these new technologies that make us available to contact everywhere have become too much. Now we are always traceable, as if we couldn’t escape our work life, not even in our free time. As if we weren’t allowed to take breaks, to not work every single second. 

People deserve free time. We deserve to be away from work for at least one day a week. We already overwork ourselves with insane amounts of tasks that seem to never end. We are always perfecting ourselves and looking to be the most perfect employee. As if that was even possible to begin with. We already do SO much. Why would it be needed to have us work even after hours? Some employees already work after hours to try to have better metrics. Why would you now force them to do those hours just to not even pay them for them? Bosses have too high expectations of their employees. They are not robots. Everyone deserves a break.