Senior software engineer Cameron (not his real name) works in Melbourne - often at all hours of the day.
"If the website goes down at any time, you are responsible to be there and fixing the issues immediately," the 45-year-old said.
"I think the company expects that now."
He said in his industry, staff are unable to avoid overtime.
"The companies can put in the contract, and all of them do that these days - they just say your contract stipulates that you need to work any additional time that a company needs you."
Cameron says he believes trends from Silicon Valley are influencing his working life.
"Personally I am struggling to be a good dad and a good husband versus, you know being in a decent job," the father-of-two said.
The question of what constitutes appropriate hours in the workplace has hit the news recently.
After several months working as independent MP Monique Ryan's chief of staff, former head of Change.org Sally Rugg took Ms Ryan to court earlier this year, after being asked to work "unreasonable hours" of more than 70 hours a week.
A Federal Court judge ruled in March that it would be unreasonable for Ms Ryan to continue employing Ms Rugg, and the pair are set to decide on a timeline for the trial and meet for a case management hearing in the coming weeks.
While that case is yet to be resolved, it's triggered a conversation around working hours, and work-life balance.
What are the rules around working overtime?
Associate solicitor Antonia Tahhan, from Sydney's Chamberlain's Law Firm, said staff need to check their enterprise agreements or contracts for overtime provisions or reasonable additional hours.
"Employees need to be aware of what they're required to do under the award and as well what they are contracting to," she said.
The Fair Work Ombudsman defines the maximum regular hours for a full-time employee as 38 hours per week. It defines overtime as work beyond a worker's ordinary hours, outside the agreed hours or outside the spread of this time frame. The employee can refuse the request to stay on longer if it's unreasonable.
Ms Tahhan said the 'reasonable additional hours' term is not defined in legislation. However, courts have tried to define the meaning of extra hours on a case-by-case basis.
"It's really important that employees know their rights and entitlements and also that they are being compensated correctly," she said.
Antonia Tahhan is from Chamberlains Law Firm. Source: Supplied
"Then you have to attend and look at a problem and try to fix it even if it's like 3am in the morning," he said.
Cameron said the payment to be on-call for his work is just an extra $50 overnight between 5pm and 9am.
"Then there's also overtime as well, which is you know if there is an incident or anything like a data breach, we have different severities," he said of the priority levels for problems.
He named one example where his team finished up at 4.30am and returned to work a few hours later for the morning start to the day.
"If everyone is working until 4.30am you try to keep up as well," he said.
"It's very hard to stay in an industry when it demands so much of you," Cameron said.
He said this is overtime without pay and staff feel the peer pressure to front up the following morning after a late finish. He feels the situation is unfair.
In recent months, cases relating to overtime have hit the courts.
The Financial Services Union has launched legal action against National Australia Bank over what it calls excessive, unsafe and unreasonable work hours for staff on behalf of four managers.
Law firm Gordon Legal has also launched a class action for junior doctors alleging some health services failed to pay doctors in training for unrostered overtime worked.
They claim that employers failed to pay overtime in compliance with their industrial agreement.
Ms Tahhan named several industries as ones to watch based on information from the Fair Work Ombudsman.
"Reports recently by the Fair Work Ombudsman indicated that this was prevalent in areas such as hospitality and restaurant industry workers, large corporate firms," she said.
These reports were based on worker back-payments and under-payments, with the Ombudsman stating that investigations of large corporations are a priority, while cafes and fast food sectors are an important focus for 2022-23.
Associate Professor Angela Knox from the University of Sydney Business School said work may be more intense, and labour shortages are an issue.
"There are many who are losing that work-life balance and they have worked so intensively through the pandemic, many of these workers are probably, were or might continue to engage in quiet quitting," she said.
She said many workers are potentially unaware of what is a reasonable overtime request.
What are workers' rights in relation to overtime?
Staff working from home can find it hard to separate their life from their job. Source: AAP
To determine reasonable hours, the Fair Work Act states that aspects such as needs of the business, personal circumstances, notice given, usual patterns of work in the industry, the employee's role and level of responsibility, as well as risks to the employee's health and safety need to be taken into account.
"If an employee is required to be online and attending to emails and work outside of their ordinary hours then that may be considered a reasonable additional hour," she said.
The Fair Work Ombudsman says an employee can refuse overtime if the request is unreasonable and factors like fatigue need to be accounted for.
Ms Tahhan said staff working from their home office can also adopt bad overtime habits.
"Employers do not want to be liable I guess for employees just willingly continuing to work, there is a fine line there as well," Ms Tahhan said.
"In my own experience I slip into working past the 5 o'clock or 5.30 deadline and I do that willingly."
