When I've had employers try to claim weekend/evening work was "theirs", I've sent them a link to that legislation and a pro forma invoice for all my time during employment with them for the difference between 168 hours per week at equivalent hourly rate and what they've actually paid me so far. That nicely sets the tone for further discussion.
(I only got threatened with being fired on the spot once for doing that, on which they did not follow through, and I was already interviewing elsewhere anyway...)
IIRC the wording in Australian legislation is that employers can require full-time employees to work "reasonable overtime". So that doesn't sound right - at least, not as a rule across the board. Perhaps under certain awards.
Even then, it's fairly useless wording. It does nothing to resolve disagreements between employer/employee as to what's reasonable. An extra hour once a year? 10 hours every week? Big difference between the two.
How often it’s ‘enforced’ is, like you said, probably isn’t great
"Reasonable overtime" is only one example - there's a whole host of other really basic questions that you can't get simple, definitive answers to.
For example, can I employ someone on a 12 month contract? What about 24 months? 36 months? At some point, they become a full-time/ongoing employee and get the benefits of unfair dismissal/redundancy, which means the whole "fixed-term" thing becomes meaningless. The problem is, it's never clear at what point that actually occurs.
Gut feeling is that this is because all politicians know it's an absolute minefield, so none of them is willing to touch it. Better to leave it vague enough that no-one can accuse them of favouring business or employees, because no-one really has any clue what's going on. Kick the can down the road and let FWA deal with it.
I'm talking about "full-time employee for a fixed-term" versus "full-time employee on an ongoing permanent basis".
In both cases, they're employees, not 'contractors' (so you withhold PAYG, pay their superannuation, etc).
But in the first case, you don't have an obligation to continue employing them after (say) 12 months.
The second, you are obliged to do so, so you can't turn around and say "we just don't want to employ you any more" after 12 months. You need to follow the redundancy provisions or terminate them for cause.
The problem is that it's not explicit whether businesses can actually offer the first type of contract (or more specifically, that if I employ someone on an 18-month, it's not explicit that they can't claim a redundancy payout when those 18 months end).
Even so, as a matter of law, it's not required.
If the guy's last couple month's productivity goes through the floor and he has dozens of hour+ long phone calls to his lawyer's office, he might be in trouble.
No, that would be illegal in pretty much every state, except possibly the worker-hostile US Deep South.
The moonlighting laws in CA seem to give them leway to so if they are in a related area to my project, which for AmaGoopleSoft is potentially everything that can be done with software these days.
This is backwards. CA's laws are one of the few in the country that actually let you do this type of thing. Most states let companies have extremely permissive claims to products/IP created by their workers, even off the clock. CA is one of the few states that strongly protects workers' individual creations produced off the clock. In a nutshell, unless you're an executive, material employee, or significant owner of the company, the stuff you make in your free time is yours unless it's directly within the scope of the Company's business activities. And generally, even in those situations CA law provides procedures to protect the workers' independently created IP.
Note: off the clock for these purposes roughly means that you're (a) not in the office/facility and (b) not working on a specific task or project for the company. I'm not going into all of the nuances in this comment.
> No, that would be illegal in pretty much every state, except possibly the worker-hostile US Deep South.
A friend of mine had to put his PhD on-hold when the company he worked for was acquired by Oracle, while his lawyer and their lawyers argued over whether the "standard employment contract" he was being asked to sign prevented him from publishing his thesis as required by the university to complete his PhD... A face value reading pretty much claimed "everything you think while employed by Oracle becomes IP exclusively owned by Oracle", and his new manager, their manager, and several levels up the corporate hierarchy all stuck to that interpretation for months before granting what was desc ribed to them as an "extremely unusual one-time-only expemtion which you musty not disclose to any colleagues".
That being said, this story doesn't make sense unless it takes place outside of CA. Work for a PhD thesis is generally done on university grounds, giving the university the putative right to the underlying IP. A third-party employer like Oracle would have to duke it out with the university to claim ownership, no matter what their employment contracts said.
OTOH, if work for the PhD was done using Oracle facilities and equipment, then it makes perfect sense for Oracle to investigate IP ownership since many PhD thesis projects go on to become valuable commercial products.
It was without doubt a time wasting and frustrating shitfight ensuring he was "allowed" to think about his PhD topic after being acquired by Oracle (although he had enough equity to have done quite nicely out of the deal anyway, I suspect...)
...if you work from home?
If you absolutely had to use your personal computer for a full time gig I can’t imagine how having a clean slate and user namespace wouldn’t be beneficial.
Discreet SSH keys, directories, downloads, etc.
This setup allows me full separation for each client plus my own stuff. Personally I think this is the best solution. Only downside is that requires a good internet connection, which in my country is a non-issue
I'm even further removed from company time: not only am I salaried non-exempt, but I mostly work remotely.
My own rule (without taking into account any legal advice I don't need, since I'm not working on my own startup) is to be very strict about the resources that belong to the company, and not mix them with anything I do for fun or personal/professional growth.
Did you mean you are exempt?
If you're working from home and don't have normal "work hours" then it's not so well-defined.
It gets trickier if you are, say, eating lunch or are there after common working hours.