In Portugal is the state that micro manages you and your company.
It would be a much better world if our neighbours 9 year old was sent down to the local pencil factory every night for six hours and ay weekends to pick up the pencils that ocassionally fly out of the machine into those hard to reach areas between the conveyor belts and sharpening machines. He could make a few dollars a day and pay for his own food and clothes!
Why don't you go to Bangladesh and ask them to set minimum wage laws and maximum working hours? It would help Portugal more than this law, but not so sure about Bangladesh...
I'm Portuguese btw and know very well what I'm talking about. Just crossing the border to Spain makes big difference in a young guy's prospects in life.
The problem is that bosses can sneakily introduce things that weren't agreed on, and this is usually bad for the worker because the worker has less power in the relationship, there are frictions to switching jobs, they have leverage over your reputation, and resolving the dispute via government or the courts is impractical and expensive.
This can be thought of as a type of mild fraud, where two parties came to a contractual agreement that one party then violated (or perhaps it's a grey area that wasn't explicitly covered contractually).
This is why everyone should be in favor of some basic level of worker protection. Even if you're a hard libertarian - as they are purportedly against fraud, too.
The topic of receiving boss messages out of work hours was no hot topic at all in Portugal. Only on the minds of politicians who are more attuned to the concerns of managerial classes in Brussels than in Portugal.
Elections are coming in 2022, one more reason for them to fire more populist laws like one.
One more measure to keep Portugal the eternal cheap beach destination serving wealthy foreigners (read average working class from Germany or Holland) in holiday resorts and restaurants in our lovely sunny cities.
The problem that I have seen with people trying to take advantage of lower taxes for expats is that you can't easily find jobs that pay well. So even with lower taxes your net salary is not as high if are coming from an northern European coutry or US.