Comment by 6510
4 years ago
You are not fired for that, you are fired for responding slower than the other candidate. Employers have to chose all the time. Who to promote? Who gets the shit task? Who will fly to the tropical resort?
You end up with millions of individual struggles with boundaries set by need/urgency, ability to say no, how much of a dick the boss is etc etc
In NL we have some law for a sector where people need to sleep on their shift while still on call. They get some small hourly compensation for those hours. When called their normal shift starts which has a minimum duration. After working for the maximum number of hours per day/week someone else will have to take over. Perhaps an exception like that could work.
Something like 25% of the normal hourly rate for being available. (for example 4 hours after each shift (20h) and 12 hours in the weekend (24h) for 12 hours extra pay) When called it is considered a minimum duration shift of 3 hours, hours beyond 8 or after 18:00 at overtime rate. The 3 hours are removed starting with the last work day of the week and the first of the next.
This is not a situation unique to after hours messages. The workplace is full of instances where an employer can discriminate against an employee in small but meaningful ways, you need robust employee protections, not a series of questionable legal hacks.
Replace responding slower with say being a different skin color. If a white and a black employee are equal on meaningful metrics but one gets to go on all the fun trips while the other is consistently given the shit tasks, that's obviously a problem, but you can't simply avoid the situation where the problem might present itself. You need structures in place so that employees can identify that they're being mistreated, notify someone with the power to fix the situation, confirm that the problem has actually been solved, and escalate if not; all without fear of retaliation. That is tough to do, but it doesn't make it any less necessary. Once you have that system in place, it is the logical way to deal with all forms of mistreatment. Then there is no need for special exceptions which substitute one rigid restriction for another.