I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a manager's perspective on telecommuting, a perspective provided by IT Business Edge's Ken Hardin, who viewed the prospect with considerable skepticism based on his experience with staff taking advantage of being off-site to rearrange their schedules without prior approval. My comment on the issue was that, be that as it may, it seemed to me that management frequently got the better part of the bargain in that employees who were previously out of reach after regular working hours were now not only available, but often expected, to stay in touch during time that was previously personal.

Now it seems that some employees are trying to raise awareness of the issue, as ABC News writers object to expectations that they keep up with their e-mail on their own time via Blackberry. Some legal experts, cited in the linked article and no doubt standing to benefit from the trend, foresee increasing complaints of this type, followed by legal action to force the issue.

This is probably an inevitable point of conflict considering views such as Hardin's and my own coming face to face over increasingly vanishing hours in which one can expect to remain undisturbed by business. Business owners may be suspicious of staff who aren't on site while they are working, but they don't show any signs of shrinking from expecting it nonetheless.

Hardin claimed that he was a crotchety manager when he put forward his views, but he has nothing on productivity expert Laura Stack, quoted in the above article saying:

"Show me one employee who doesn't waste time at work," the Colorado-based author said. "I see so much abuse of working hours by employees-personal phone calls, socializing, checking eBay listings, booking personal travel, etc.-that I don't believe it's unreasonable for an employer to want a bit of work on personal hours.

"If you don't want to be on call, don't be a doctor, a computer technician, or a reporter," she added.

But it's not an issue of not wanting to be on call, necessarily, but instead of being properly compensated for the obligation. The proper answer to Stack's complaint isn't to keep people on the hook during their personal time, but rather to stop them wasting time at work... or figure out why that is somehow an issue which suddenly requires compensation, when it has surely existed and been accounted for by employers for hundreds of years now.

And of course it's not simply restricted to roles which have traditionally been on-call; Blackberries are pervasive across industries today. You are as likely to see your neighborhood accountant checking his as your doctor. Accounting is suddenly an on-call profession? If so, then perhaps Stack's logic should be applied the other way around: maybe wasting time at work should be required to compensate for intrusions on personal hours at home.