First, I would expect the waiver mentioned in the article would hold up as long as the workers were not required to be checking their email outside of work hours. If they are required to check, then they must get paid for it.

Second, I make sure that I own my own cell phone. If the company wants to compensate me for it, that's fine, but I want to own it so that I can turn it off when I want.

Third, In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the rules for exempt workers, says that if you work any part of your salary period (Usually Day or half-day) then you worked that day and it is paid, so if you are on vacation and they call you that is no longer a vacation day, it's a work day. This should also be true of weekends, if your salary period is Day then working on a Saturday should get you another day's pay but probably won't. Most employers will tell you that your salary is a weekly pay but if that is so then when you get that phone call on vacation then the whole week should be considered work. I assume that most business get around this by tricky wording in the vacation policy (example might be calling it an out of office policy), but also because no worker is going to jeopardize their job over it.

It should be noted that this is my own, non-lawyerly, reading of the law from when I was working on calculating overtime for a payroll system 10 years ago.

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JimFive