its a fine argument made well, but no.. the job description and the work as directed are the agreement between the employee and the company. IANAL it seems that

its a fine argument made well, but no.. the job description and the work as directed are the agreement between the employee and the company. IANAL it seems that the fundamentals here are abusive or unwinnable terms of employment, fundemental labor rights that may not be overridden, and yes, slacker or cheating employees who may be gaming their supervision and what to do about that. History is full of outrageous "agreements" by the powerful applied to the powerless, so there have to be labor laws that set an even playing field. Distributed work across legal jurisdictions is an opportunity to push those labor agreements and avoid consequences. On the other hand, there have always been cheaters among workers and that wont go away, either. Modern technology has opened a pandora's box of constant surveillance that was not practical or even possible previously. There have to be new agreements on labor practices. It is a political problem. Compounding the urgency of this situation in an advanced economy is the looming implementation of AI to replace workers, and to enable a few workers to do the work of many, many more of the past. This time around, middle-managers are included in those that are replaceable, or perhaps even mid-level leadership i.e. "your boss is an AI"