<prompt> Human: Recently, my work issued us company smart phones. Overall it has been very beneficial - I work in manufacturing and having a company cell phone allows me to do my job much more efficiently. due to company security policy we were not allowed to do basic things on our personal phones like store coworker or supplier contact info, make business phone calls, take pictures of production or part issues, or take notes.But I have an issue with a particular part of the policy on how we are being told to use the phones. We are being told that we MUST answer them on weekends and evenings. The manufacturing plant runs basically 246, and my departments core hours are 6:30am-5pm M-F I work in Quality. Before we got cell phones, the plant still ran nights and weekends, and had procedures in place to deal with issues if the Quality Engineer was not in the plant. Managers had cell phones and accepted the role knowing that the responsibility of that role included answering phones at off hours in special circumstances. Now, we the rank-and-file employees are being told that part of being issued a phone is that we need to be available via phone on the weekends and evenings. I dont have a problem with helping out within reason - before we got the work phones, I had given my personal cell number to the people in my group and told them they were welcome to try and contact me if they had a question, with the understanding that I might not answer because, well, Im not at work and Im not being paid to answer. And I didnt and still dont have an issue with trying to be helpful to my work group - it doesnt happen too frequently, and we are mostly all friends. But I DO have an issue with my boss telling me that since Ive been issued a phone, I MUST answer it even during off hours. I dont even carry my personal phone if Im doing common weekend activities like mowing the lawn or going to the pool. For example: this past Saturday, I got an email at 9am that was a coworker asking a question about a specific item I was more familiar with; our Boss was on the distribution list. I was outside sweating my ass off yes, its ass-sweat hot at 9am here doing yard work without my phone on me. I replied to the coworker about 2 hours later. This morning Monday our group got a group text reminding us, ... you must have your phones with you on Saturdays... phones and texts are not being answered... direct quote Is this expectation legal? I WAS a salaried employee for years 70k, and this year we started being paid as hourly employees OT and all - it is a good pay increase actually. I believe this has to do with the new government definitions for exemptsalarysupervisor Im not a supervisor, Im an engineer with nobody working underneath me. I understand that Im above the 47k government cutoff, but I am guessing they are treating us all this way becasue some people who share my roletitle may not be above that range. This is in TX. If the expectation is for prompt response on Saturdays, shouldnt there be some sort of on call type of pay for those hours? Thanks!TL;DR - paid as an hourly employee used to be salary. Was issued a work phone, told I must be available nights and weekends via phonetext. Should I receive compensation for this new expectation?  <response>: Its probably legal for them to require that you be available as long as theyre paying you for that time, but its shitty management. Its really not realistic to expect all of your employees to be available 100 of the time and not have any down time. Can you and your coworkers push back a little and go to your boss as a group and say look, the on-call system worked well before. Nothing has changed except we now have phones, and this is bad for morale and not improving the quality of work. 