I've worked for few years for an IT company as software developer, the new management wants to amend all our contracts to introduce an on call clause.
In other words it means that all developers are supposed to be part of a rota and hopefully, not more often than once a month, each developer is going to spend a weekend on call where in 48 hours he/she is expected to acknowledge alerts within 15 minutes. (And work to fix them.)
I understand the idea behind it, if you do bad software and something goes wrong at weekends, you have to fix it.
I get anxious very easily, I have a family to look after, and my hobbies as well, my weekends aren't on sale. Even if I was interested, with this contract change they are offering a salary increase of £2000 per annum.
I'm not a lazy person, I always try to understand, to help and be known as an individual with an high degree of professionalism.
But this time I really can't do it.
Once you have signed the new contract you really don't know where you may end up in few months/years time, you can stay in a team with no alerts, or may end up in a team that is flooded by alerts.
Also, the more pressure the business will do in the future for releasing new features quickly, the more chances of buggy software will be. (Pressure and support all on developers shoulders)
Can I reject this coming change in my employment contract? (I'm based in UK)
EDIT
Now it turns out that people are on call 24/7 for a whole week every 4/5 weeks. Teams where people talk each other managed to push it back, other teams where people don't talk, panicked and accepted. No negotiation and nor representation has happened.