Flexible work is commonly presented as an exchange in which employees gain control over when and where work occurs while organizations gain adaptability, retention, and productivity. This article argues that the exchange becomes ethically and organizationally problematic when formal discretion is combined with intensified expectations, permanent reachability, hidden working time, and individualized responsibility for managing incompatible demands. As a Critical Viewpoint Article, it develops an evidence-informed but non-empirical account of how autonomy may be converted into a vehicle for internalized organizational control. The proposed synthesis connects four mechanisms: autonomy pressure, availability norms, responsibility transfer, and organizational disavowal of harm. It defines self-exploitation through responsibility transfer as employee overextension represented as personal choice even though workload, evaluation systems, reciprocity expectations, or flexibility rhetoric materially generate that choice. The article further proposes that responsible flexibility requires genuine and reversible discretion, realistic workloads, protected non-work time, equitable and career-neutral access, proportionate monitoring, and credible voice, review, and remedy. These principles are normative design commitments rather than a validated model or universal prescription. Their relevance is conditional on occupation, employment security, task interdependence, household arrangements, managerial practice, and institutional context. Longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, and process-sensitive research is needed to test whether the proposed mechanisms explain when flexibility preserves autonomy and when it reorganizes control through the employee’s own self-management. The contribution is a critical reframing of flexible-work harm as an organizational accountability problem rather than merely an individual boundary-management failure.
