Story by Tannur Anders
A ruling has found that a boss did not breach a “right to disconnect” law by sending her apprentices TikToks and messages after work and being upset when they did not respond.
In two separate cases, the South Australian Employment Tribunal (SAET) heard claims that Amelia Elliot and Jessica Kalleske felt pressured to respond to out-of-hours messages from Eco Hair Room owner Tanika McGuire.
The right for employees to disconnect from work when not on duty was introduced in 2024 and applied to small businesses from August 2025.
It grants employees the right to ignore calls, emails and texts from their bosses after hours.
Eco Hair Room has been trading for more than six years© Instagram
Kalleske said there was a “consistent pattern” of contact outside working hours. This included contact on days off, while attending trade school and when she was sick or on leave.
“It appeared that if one staff member did not respond, Ms McGuire would contact others,” she told the tribunal.
“This created an ongoing expectation of availability and contributed to stress.”
Kalleske said she needed urgent medical treatment and asked for privacy after supplying medical certificates, but alleged McGuire continued to repeatedly call and message her.
“She also attempted to contact my family, including calling my mother, in an effort to obtain information about my condition,” she told the court, the Mail reports.
“I did not feel comfortable disclosing personal medical information and found this conduct to be an overreach of professional boundaries.”
Jessica Kalleske said there was a© Instagram
Elliott said during her own employment tribunal that McGuire frequently sent her TikTok and Snapchat videos outside work hours, “mostly about her social life”.
She also received messages about non-urgent work matters.
“If the applicant did not respond before returning to work, the respondent would be in a bad mood and would ignore her,” the tribunal noted in its summary of facts.
Elliott said McGuire once required her to take the salon’s mobile phone home over a long weekend to receive work messages. Elliott said she did not actively monitor the device while she had it.
Deputy President Stephen Lieschke ruled the right to disconnect is a right to ignore, and the issue was not whether a boss communicated with workers in an unwelcome way, but if the employer prevented the worker, directly or indirectly, from exercising that right.
He acknowledged that the contact was “unpleasant and intrusive”, but found McGuire had not breached the right to disconnect laws.
“(Ms Kalleske) was not subject to any consequence when she did not respond, and there is no other evidence of (Ms McGuire) attempting to prevent (Ms Kalleske) from not responding,” he wrote in his published decision.
“In my view, these circumstances fall short of the respondent breaching the prohibition against directly or indirectly preventing the applicant from disconnecting.”
