One-sided availability: when their emergency is your duty, but your right is a luxury

It is ten in the evening. You are finally sitting at home, with your family, trying to gather the pieces of calm after a long and exhausting day at work. Suddenly the phone in your pocket starts to vibrate. It is a call from work. A small problem in the warehouse, something the day shift forgot, or the latest whim of a director who did not know how to organise his own day.

In that second, you are not simply expected to answer. You are expected to be on military standby. You are expected to drop whatever is in your hands, forget that you have a life outside the company's doors and run to put out the fire of a mismanagement you did not create. Because in the vocabulary of our managers, the employee has no hours, no family and no right to be unreachable. For them, you are on permanent standby, a rented piece of property that can be switched on at any second of the day or the night.

But let us do a simple exercise in honesty. What happens when this arrow points the other way?

Try, even just once, to ask for an answer outside office hours. Try calling the owner or the manager in the evening about something unclear in your pay, about an injustice done during the day, or about a small personal emergency where you need the support of those who call you part of the "family".

In that moment, the world changes at dizzying speed. The phone rings out without an answer, or goes to voicemail. And the next morning, when you ask what happened, the answer comes with a bureaucrat's coldness: There are office hours. Why are you bothering me at home? Why don't you come to the office at the set times?

Let me say it openly, without gloves. This is not operational management; it is a feudal exploitation of people's time and nerves.

This unfair split of the rules shows clearly how the system works. For the company, your time is worth nothing. It can be cut into pieces, trampled on and taken without asking, because in the minds of those in charge, the laughable wage they give you does not only buy your eight hours of work in the warehouse or the office; it buys your soul, your peace and every minute of your private life.

When there is a mistake to fix, when there is a director's incompetence to cover, when there are emergencies created by a lack of organisation, you are the first person called onto the stage. You are the soldier on standby who must sacrifice sleep and family.

But when it comes to your rights, to respecting the contract, to counting overtime correctly or to a simple human answer for the sweat you have shed, the boundaries go up as concrete walls. The rulebook is remembered only when it serves the interests of those who hold the till. For everything else, for you, there is only a silent duty: to bow your head and say thank you.

This kind of constant pressure keeps the employee in a permanent state of anxiety. Even at home, your mind stays on the phone, waiting for the next ring. This is not a life; it is a small psychological prison, where the wall of your cell is the screen of a phone that never stops shaking.

A healthy company does not work like this. In a real business, the line between work and private life is sacred. Respecting another person's hours is not weakness; it is the first sign of civility in business. When a manager learns to organise his work within eight hours, he never needs to ruin the night of a tired employee.

And every employee caught in this trap today has only one way to win back their dignity: to set firm boundaries. Work has hours, and life outside work has value. The ability to say no when the phone rings in the middle of the night over chaos that a little organisation could have prevented is not a lack of commitment. It is the first step towards the recovery of a free person.

Because at the end of the day, no wage in this world is enough to buy the right to treat you as endless property. Your time is the only real wealth you have in this life, and no one, whatever title or chair they hold in the office, has the authority to steal it under the false cloak of everyday emergencies.