As an American working in Canada:
Canada has a much stronger workers rights culture, and tends to have regulatory agencies that can produce results. (At the individual level, regulatory capture at the macro scale is just as prevalent, if not more so in the case of extractive industries).
It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.
I'm in the US, and here very very few jobs have even 1 of those things you listed here. What proportion of the world has those things? Like 7-8 countries total?
Edit: I guess I need to stop commenting at this hour, HN is ridiculous with their down votes when the Europeans are on. God forbid someone tries to ask a question here.
The thing is the above things are not a general thing. Those are rights that IT workers specifically don't have, that are otherwise mandated by labour law. So, one of the countries that has these things is actually Canada (or more strictly speaking, the provinces of canada, since this is provincial jurisdiction but they all broadly follow the same formula including afaik this exemption).
IT is not the only field with these exemption but it is perhaps one of the least motivated. Afaik, it was added to the list when most IT workers were working in critical infrastructure like telecom. It's not really justified anymore, if it ever was (imo it isn't justified for anyone, but I am probably rare in thinking that in an entrepreneur-focused space).
Don't blame the Europeans, Americans downvote anything in favour of freedom of contract (or against unions etc) just as well.
It's not quite as bad as reddit, yet, where you get downvoted to hell for suggesting that the rule of law is preferable to mob violence against people accused of being 'parasites' or accused of certain crimes or thoughtcrime.
My state has legally mandated lunch every 6 hrs and overtime pay past 40 - mind my asking which state you're in? It sucks if those are all absent in both Ontario and in general here.
I live in Toronto. Ontario enacted those laws targeting IT professionals in the 1990s to attract "IT companies" by making things flexible for them. This was before the current acute tech shortage. As somebody who entered the tech field circa 2003, I saw companies take advantage of some of these early on (especially related to overtime). Nowadays, I can pretty much dictate the terms of my employment.
> When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
This also occurs in the US and is more due to tech labor market tightness.
It's part of the market. But it's not the only driving force.
Employees can't magically 'expect' their total comp up or down. But expectations can drive how that comp is commonly split between eg salary and benefits like longer lunch hours.
No, expectations of employees + supply and demand are the market. If your job is in high supply, your expectations matter very little because there will always be someome more desperate willing to work in worse conditions.
> If your job is in high supply, your expectations matter very little because there will always be someone more desperate willing to work in worse conditions.
'Always' is an exaggeration, but yes, that's the gist of it.
> It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses.
According to the link, this is not the case. It seems very clear that the only requirement is that the policy is written down.
> When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
That's been standard practice every place I've worked in the United States, too. Not by law, just because it's a decent thing to do.
When I was working for Google as an SRE, oncall hours counted like 2/3 of normal hours. Whether an incident happened or not. (To give teams an incentive to clean up their service!)
You had the choice of idling off those extra hours with extra vacation or to get them paid out.
Oncall hours tracking was capped at 15% of normal hours, to give you an incentive to distribute oncall equally around the team. (I never heard of anyone seriously hitting that cap.)
Overall, seemed like a well-thought-out and fair system to me.
It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.