The way I see it, the pressure has been "outsourced" to the employer rather than being an implicit pressure on the employee. Western European companies can also require workers to be on pager duty or work outside normal working hours, but it needs to be treated as actual work, adhere to the regulations, and be appropriately compensated. Prohibitive costs may convince the employer not to exercise this option and instead "outsource" the pressure to employees in areas with more lenient regulations. This is the choice of the employer, not of the employee working in the western European country.

I work on a team that is split across North America and Europe, and or standard is that we all avoid meetings outside our working hours.

It’s understood that European folks try to schedule Europe-only meetings in the morning so that there is plenty of time available in the afternoon for NA colleagues, and conversely NA folks keep their mornings open for team meetings.

I personally shift my work day to starting at 7 so that I have an even larger overlap, but not all of us do that and it is not expected of anyone.

The need to schedule meetings at unreasonable times is one of the drawbacks of outsourcing and globally distributed teams, no disagreement here.

It's within the (usually hard-fought for) rights of employees in many countries to refuse such meetings. Unless they explicitly signed up for such a schedule of course. However, I would be very surprised if freelancers and people in leadership positions can refuse to participate in such meetings. In turn, they usually have higher salaries.

Of course, it sucks for people in other countries not being able to refuse to work at weird times. But if they could refuse, their country would immediately be much less attractive as an outsourcing destination.

Edit: tl; dr: regular remote meetings should between people in leadership positions. Day-to-day work should be managed by local managers, else it will either suck for everybody or suck enormously for workers in the country with weaker worker rights.

I do that too. I am not giving into the pressure set up by the company and it’s up to the other people to refuse too. Otherwise the company sets up abusive systems and workers play along. We all need to resist this abuse.

My company has a culture where it's totally okay to refuse, I've even gotten invites at 2am whenever they hold a webinar during their morning. Regardless of that we still see replies from engineers there when it's 2am for them (they are not on call at that time and it's not an emergency).

The company’s boneheaded decision to hire people in incompatible time zones doesn’t create some kind of moral obligation for employees.

its still possible to do meetings (timewise) between europe and asia at for both acceptable hours though,societal pressure aside

Another aspect to this is that the far-away collegues might be fewer, so they adapt to the majority.

You can't argue with the clock.

When I was living in Hawaii I was up at the crack-end a few times a month, pounding coffee, trying to ignore the roosters.

Social acceptability had nothing to do with it. It wasn't a great hour for Brussels either.