Personally, at that point I would start demanding 24/7 pay coverage. You don't get to tell me what I can or cannot do outside of the hours that you're paying for.
Worked for an MSP that basically required 24/7 availability but wouldn't pay for it. They got around it by saying things like your ringer must be at 100% volume at all times, you must be working within 30 minutes of receiving the call, and then you must clock out the minute you stop working. They'd want you to wake up at 2:03 AM, work on something for 5 minutes, and clock out at 2:08 AM. The way the rules you were wrote, you could get in trouble for just about everything except not answering the phone entirely. So guess what I started doing?
So the big companies have a cartel to suppress their workers' salaries, and then they write "we pay you more than we ought to" into their contracts.
They probably believe people should feel honored to work for them for free, but paying you less than fair market salary and taking away all your hobbies is the most they can get.
In all honesty, this should not even be possible to require in a contract (and I'm fairly sure that it indeed isn't, in most EU countries), considering that employment contracts are negotiated from a position of power imbalance.
I'm in the EU; I mentioned that I don't think the verbiage was really enforceable, but that can't stop them from putting it in. Fortunately it never came to be tested in a court of law :)
Power imbalance is wildly dependant on a lot of factors and it's already reflected in the contract clauses and compensation. I personally wouldn't care about that clause and I'd happily work for them (provided my requirements were met - and, to be fair, a company coming up with this clauses probably wouldn't).
This is usually a problem for lower paid jobs, not for developers.
Hiring a good developer is hard, hiring a good cleaner is simple.
Law and application seem to differ/lag somewhat. Each influences the other. It’s worth being aware that neither fully determines the other, and that each evolves in parallel. We live in an organic world where things are not as well defined and predictable as the typical programmer might wish. To thrive, one must dirty oneself in the actual code, rather than get bogged down in the terminology of the man page.
