Is this an unreasonable demand?

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My company does this every year around the holidays, and we are considered state government workers, so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be doing it if it weren't legal. Maybe it varies by state. They do it because they want to be able to shut the whole place down for an extended time to save on electricity.

Well, if they're able to get away with it it's because the economy crisis continues, each company has a lot less competition than they used to in terms of getting employees.

That would be something they tell you far in advance and the period of time you're 'off' is equivalent to a vacation time (a week or two). What I understand from what the OP said is that at the whim of the employer, they are making them take days off far apart.. literally using their paid time off (paid vacation time) to the benefit of the company.

Have you checked if you can claim the phone as a work related tax deduction?

I mentioned above, on the contrary, we have to pay income tax for the phone because it's considered a benefit received from the company.

In Australia if it's a work related item then it's an expense...if you paid for it out of your own pocket

I know...I used to claim mobile phone expenses from a previous employer. Our tax laws are almost identical...

On the tax issue, you might need to ask a tax expert (even the IRS has people who can research and best advise how to deal with an issue).

Normally, if YOU get to use the phone for personal use (unrestricted) it is a BENEFIT to you.

If you are restricted from using it for personal use, it IS NOT a benefit to you.

That SHOULD be the standard any tax authority goes on. A business that wants to call you at home would normally call YOUR home phone. If you happen to have a mobile, they'll call that, but you had that ahead of time. If they REQUIRE you to have a mobile for business but won't let you use it for personal use, it's a business expense...pure and simple.

You need to nail down the personal use policy for this phone, and if they don't restrict YOUR use of it, then find a way to make the most of having it so that tax-wise you can justify why it's not going to be a write-off on your taxes. If their policy prohibits or limits personal use, then you need to confront the taxing authority as to how much of the phone should or should not be seen as a benefit to you. I'd be surprised if you had unrestricted use of the phone because the primary boondoggle of smart phones in enterprise applications is the avenue they create for viruses and malware to get onto the network. iPhones are better than others, but all pose a risk, and most places either start or adopt a restrictive use policy to prevent ruining their IT network because someone downloaded an app they shouldn't have.

This is no different than company laptops. Any serious company will give you a laptop and have IT lock it down so you can't do squat unless they've unlocked the features because they don't want to risk you downloading a program or file that could infect their whole network.

How can it be 'received from the company' if you're paying for it all?

Update: I talked to my boss (who does not live in this country) and he called HR. He was told that I had "misunderstood" and that I could keep the same phone that I have now. The same person who told me 2 weeks ago that "there's no option to keep your current phone" and when asked how much the new one will cost me: "it will cost what it will cost". What pigs. As someone above said, they obviously get better prices the more employees buy phones, so unless you fight, they try to intimidate you into buying one.

Figures.

Reminds me of an incident with an insurance company a past employer did work for. They went to electronic billing, and the company that did the service charges the provider who submits the bill for payment. No cost to the insurance company (who gets the benefit).

It's bad enough we had no choice but to sign up if we wanted to keep doing business with them, but they signed us up for the highest tier of service...several thousand dollars a year. I called and talked to someone three times before I badgered them into admitting that you only need to pay for what you use. We only paid a couple hundred dollars, and if we exceeded our tier limit, we just paid the difference for the next higher tier.

The company didn't do squat to try and watch our bottom line, and nobody was readily admitting we didn't have to buy the most expensive level of service.

If I wasn't so buggered over the cost of the service, we would have just ate the loss and thought nothing of it.