My Boss Expected Me On Call 24/7 for Free, So I Let It Backfire

No, apparently it doesn't - yet. India seems to have an incredibly toxic workplace culture baked into its general culture, but that looks to be starting to change.
The reason many other countries have the labour laws they do is because they've learned the hard way that insisting on constant employee availability and operating under the assumption that work-life balance is an idea that a bunch of entitled brats dressed up in mommy and daddy's suits came up with, rather than a psychological necessity for any human being - those things ultimately backfire and hurt everyone, including the company's bottom line.
There's this idea that companies can only succeed if their basic pose is ruthless and adversarial - even or perhaps especially toward their employees. They end up assuming that they *have* to push workers to constantly go further than they sustainably can, because otherwise they'll fuck the dog all day. And it's like, well of course people are going to slack off every chance they get if they're constantly overworked, underpaid, exhausted and resentful! If that's how you feel all the time, why wouldn't you try to stick it to the man in little ways?
The other inevitable result is burnout. With the best will in the world, any person can only push themselves to operate constantly at 120% for so long - and then they crash, often spectacularly. I've done it repeatedly, and it took me a long time to realize it wasn't because I was weak, but rather because I was trying to do the impossible as a matter of course.

Anyway, there have been so many studies done on the productivity of workers with decent compensation, workplace protections and hours in a supportive and healthy workplace culture compared to the productivity of workers (even well-compensated workers!) in a toxic and adversarial workplace culture and a job with few protections - and every damn time, it turns out that companies ultimately save money by ensuring their employees operate in the first environment as opposed to the second. Happy people work not only harder and more willingly, but *better*. It isn't just the amount of work they turn out, but the quality of it that improves drastically. And even though you have to have all these protections for such days and mental health days...people end up using far fewer of them overall because they're not constantly on the edge of physical and mental breakdown. Employee turnover falls, so there's less disruption during important projects and the company doesn't have to spend money finding new hires all the time - the list goes on and on.
There seems to be this attitude among employers in India that every employee is immediately replaceable. In a country with India's population, this is probably true in some ways - but it doesn't prevent the company from absorbing the costs of employee burnout, constant turnover, and the lessened productivity that comes from most of your workers just being plain miserable at their jobs.
There's also the fact that the professional world is globalizing *so* fast now. When your country's entire workplace culture is too much of an outlier in that global professional world, your workers notice the difference and they can see that not only do healthier workplace cultures exist, they function *better* in almost every way for everyone involved - employers included.
I think this is the ultimate source of the enormously loud rumble of pushback I've been seeing among Indian workers and in English Indian-origin media online. Maybe in a more insular working world, people simply never saw that healthier alternatives existed - but now they often can't avoid seeing those alternatives, and seeing that the end result is better for everyone. I'd be furious too in their position: "You mean you're keeping me miserable and overworked and scared all the time even though the end quality and quantity of the work produced is *less* and you have no excuse not to know it?! Oh, fuck that!"
India will change, I think.

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