Can your boss TikTok you after hours?

At around 9pm last night, a member of the Mediaweek team dropped this story into our Slack channel: Bosses’ after-hours TikToks put right-to-disconnect laws to the test.

Believe me, the irony was not lost on any of us.

There we were, outside working hours, reading a story about the legal right not to read work-related content outside working hours. Somewhere, an employment lawyer got goosebumps.

The case itself, however, gets to a decidedly modern workplace problem: what happens when the boss follows you home without actually following you home?

Australia’s right-to-disconnect laws have faced an early legal test after two young workers alleged their boss repeatedly contacted them outside working hours through TikTok and Snapchat.

The case involved Eco Hair Room owner Tanika McGuire and two former apprentices, who claimed the South Australian hairdresser’s after-hours messages contributed to stress and blurred the already increasingly fuzzy line between work and personal time.

But the South Australian Employment Tribunal found McGuire had not breached the right to disconnect provisions, despite finding her conduct discouraged employees from switching off outside work.

It’s an important distinction, and one likely to matter well beyond hair salons and Snapchat.

The decision offers an early glimpse at how Australia’s workplace laws may handle one of the stranger consequences of the permanently connected era: your shift might end, but your phone certainly doesn’t.

When the boss lands in your TikTok

The former apprentices alleged McGuire frequently contacted them outside their rostered hours through social media platforms including TikTok and Snapchat.

Which, for anyone who remembers when leaving work meant physically walking out of a building and becoming unreachable until approximately 9am the following morning, is quite the technological leap.

According to the case, one worker was also expected to monitor a work phone during a long weekend without being paid for doing so.

The tribunal found that while McGuire’s behaviour could discourage employees from disconnecting, it had not prevented them from exercising that right or resulted in tangible negative consequences if they refused to engage.

In other words, receiving an after-hours message from the boss is not enough on its own.

McGuire was therefore found not to have breached the right-to-disconnect laws.

She was, however, ordered to pay more than $20,000 over separate underpayment issues raised in the proceedings.

READ MORE: New law could allow Australians to opt out of social media algorithms

So, can your boss still message you at 9pm?

Here’s where the right to disconnect gets slightly less catchy than its name suggests.

Australia’s laws give employees the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to work-related contact outside their working hours, unless that refusal is considered unreasonable.

They do not simply make it illegal for a boss to send an email, text, TikTok, Snapchat, Slack message or any other digital flare into the night.

The protection is centred on the employee’s right to ignore it.

Whether refusing to respond is considered unreasonable depends on several factors, including why the employee was contacted, how disruptive the contact was, whether they’re compensated for being available, their level of responsibility and their personal circumstances.

So, no, your manager hasn’t necessarily broken federal workplace law by sending “quick one for tomorrow” at 8.47pm.

Whether you have to answer it is another question entirely.

And therein lies the rub.

Work has escaped the office

The protections extend across calls, emails, texts, social media and messaging services, an increasingly important detail when the modern workplace has migrated onto the same device we use to talk to our friends, check the weather, watch videos and lose 25 inexplicable minutes scrolling through Instagram.

For employees at businesses with 15 or more workers, the laws came into effect on 26 August 2024. Small businesses followed on 26 August 2025.

But exactly how those protections operate in the real world is still being worked out.

The Fair Work Commission has acknowledged limited case law on the relatively new workplace right.

In November 2025, the Commission delayed developing detailed written guidelines on how the laws operate until enough cases had passed through the system to help inform them.

This South Australian decision now adds another piece to that puzzle.

For employers, its message is relatively straightforward: the right to disconnect isn’t a blanket ban on contacting staff once they’ve clocked off.

For employees, the more important question is whether they can reasonably choose not to answer without consequences.

Because technology has made reaching someone at 9pm remarkably easy.

Knowing when not to? Yeah, well… we’re still working on that.