One interesting difference from my experience of work conditions between the US and the UK – in the US your working hours can be moved without your explicit agreement – is this common? Any other examples?

Back in the 00s, my work opened a new office in the US, in the Central time zone (so 6 hours back). The teams started working but as we were developing and training them, it was clear after a couple of weeks that it was necessary to have more than a couple of hours overlap, them starting at 9am only gave 1:30 of shared working time. In the UK the management were fretting what to do, as they couldn’t make people in our teams stay later than 4:30pm, which was the contracted finish time. Any changes would have to go though months of HR and Union consultation and agreement and new contracts issued. Step forward the US management – “don’t worry about it, we’ll just make everyone start at 6am”, and boom, suddenly their whole team had to be in the office 3 hours earlier, but were still expected to cover the whole day (finish at 6pm), starting the very next day. No consultation, no agreement, if they didn’t want to do it they could find a new job!!!