These cutouts can be made to keep everyone happy. Say, in Switzerland for every hour you worked outside business hours, you get an hour of paid time off. Two hours if you work in the night or on a weekend.
The traditional “flex time” is nothing more than a zero-interest temporal loan, encouraging endless borrowing from the back of Sometime After Never.
I deliberately impose a stiff interest rate on that sort of borrowing within any organization I run, because while I recognize that we do need to field emergencies, we also want to penalize the “every day is an emergency” pattern so prevalent in the industry.
Destroyed moral of every-one.
A policy would have been better, and would have forced company to stop ignoring problems a lot sooner.
Just having the laws on the books, or even an enforcement mechanism that works is sometimes not enough to get them widely adopted.