GuitarBilly wrote:Casey4s wrote:How did everyone make it through a workday before we all had cell phones? If your family has an emergency they can surely contact you through your landline work phone can't they?

well, there was also a point in time where people made it through their work day without any phones at all. Or electricity. But that is irrelevant for the way things are today. Cell phones are a life line to a lot of people today. That's just the way things are in 2013. Whatever happened in the 50's -90's is not really relevant.
The work landline would be a valid option if companies didn't have an "all calls may be monitored/recorded" policy. Since pretty much all companies do have that type of policy, they can't demand employees to give their landlines for personal emergency calls, because these are calls the employee might not want the company to monitor or record. I don't necessarily want my boss to know everything that happens to my son or fiancee, yet I need a way to be reached if something happens.
We don't record our landlines or track and monitor the records at all. We don't have that kind of policy, we're just not big enough to give a shit like that. Family, spouses, friends, etc, are welcome to call the landlines in cases of emergency, or urgent personal matters. The bulletin that went out mentioned that everyone will need to inform their families, spouses, etc. how to contact them on the work numbers, and they were given several days to do so prior to the policy going into effect.
This might all lead to another problem though, which I recognize, of people just gabbing away all day long on their work lines. And people are making a lot of good points either in support or opposition of what my company's doing. Every company and operations, culture, way of doing business, way of promoting and increasing wages is different. In our case some more stringent controls needed to be implemented, and so far it's working.