At will employment is the problem. You should be able to switch off at a certain time and ignore work comms. But I think in US you’d be scared of being fired. In other countries like UK this has never been a concern, and WFH doesn’t change that.
She feels she can't practically ignore out of hours requests and she doesn't want to challenge the practice for fear of rocking the boat.
Unions are really powerful in education - it's one of the only benefits of the sector I can think of. Hopefully your wife has a union rep they can teach out to on behalf of all the staff if not just herself? Teaching assistant salaries definitely don't to high enough to compensate for anything outside of school hours!
It's not that they expect everyone else to be working these odd hours at all, just that it's the only time they themselves can catch up on work.
One colleague who is a manager even has a note to this effect in his email footer, explaining he doesn't expect others to action or respond to messages outside of normal working hours.
I was silently thought it was very interesting how they have been convinced that at will employment is a good thing... and thanking my government work laws which require any company to pay for 3 months compensation if they desire to fire me.
you realise that's a relatively privileged position in the emplyment market, right? you:
a) have enough choice in employers to be able to pick one
b) have both a profession that allows you to differentiate yourself and the skills that can make you differentiate yourself
that's unfortunately not the case for the majority of employees
It's a little patronizing for you to assume I have no experience of being unprivileged just because our opinions about it differ. Or that those without privilege can't manoeuvre their way into choosing a slightly better job, even if they don't have an absolutely free choice over the space of all possible jobs, or even if they have to take a worse one temporarily in order to transition to where they want to be. Not all poor people are mindless cattle devoid of planning or agency.
https://www.stephens-scown.co.uk/employment/employment-right...
> Even though an employee has fewer employment rights in the first two years of their employment, an employer would be foolish to assume they have carte blanche to dismiss at will.
So while it's true that there's less protection for workers, there is no at will employment in the UK. Probation period probably comes closest to it but is much shorter.
'At will' in the US and the 2 year qualifying period in the UK are practically identical, apart from that the UK has a 2-week statutory notice period. The protections that remain in both the US and UK are almost entirely about protected classes. Even the classes themselves are virtually the same.
"Have they been there less than 2 years?" is the first thing legal will ask you when you want to sack someone in the UK. It's a wholly different status to being protected after the period.