this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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As if people working two jobs are stealing and not working in exchange for proper value of money.
I don't follow. If you're claiming you're putting 40 hours of work in a week, or that is what your contract says, and you're really only doing 20 because you're splitting it between two jobs...isn't that obviously cheating the system?
Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit if people take advantage of a corporation to milk it for cash, but it seems to me to be pretty clearly cheating the system. If you want to get paid on what you produce, and not the time you put in, then you should structure your contracts that I way. I know a lot of my side work I don't bill hourly precisely because I know it can be done quickly ( for me with experience) but it's worth more to them.
If you're salaried, you're not usually obligated to work a certain number of hours, you're just obligated to complete tasks on time. If someone holds two salaried positions and works fast enough that they get all obligations for both completed in 40 hours a week, they're not cheating anyone.
Ive worked many salaried jobs in my life. I've never seen a work contract that simply defines your tasks you have to get done. Not saying that it doesn't happen, but I would be hard pressed to believe it's common. I don't even know how you would do that because what tasks I do always shifts, especially in tech. On top of that, how long a task takes is extremely unpredictable. Sometimes I fly through something, sometimes that last 10% takes 90% of the time.
*edit: contract work is very common and definitionally does not define 'time on the job', and instead lays out specific metrics of performance related to production. Salaried work is definitely far more common, but to say that's unusual or impossible is just wrong.
I think this helps elucidate the real issue here, which is the distinction between selling labor and selling your time. One of those is obviously more reasonable and the other shares a conceptual relationship with other types of indentured labor.
It used to be that the distinction didn't matter since you had to be in a particular place to do a particular work anyway, selling your labor and selling your time looked basically the same and your employer could control and manage how you spent that time. But with remote work, the employer no longer has control over managing your time because they have no (reasonable) way to monitor your production; an employer utilizing monitoring software would (rightly) be seen as an abuse and invasion of privacy. So even though the contract hasn't changed, people are more aware of how dehumanizing it is not to have sold their labor but control over a certain number of hours of their life.
I obviously have bias here, but I think defining labor by its measure of time is alienating and inhumane.
it definitely happens.
It's less about contractual and legalities and more about the feel of the workplace. A lot of places, especially remote jobs, are more laid-back and open-minded than traditional 9-to-5 ass-in-seats old fashioned office jobs.
My point is more that salaried employees, by definition, are not required to put in a certain amount of hours. That would make them hourly employees. All salaried employees are required to do is to complete their work by a deadline. What that work is and what the deadline is are usually not defined specifically in their contract, because as you said, both those things constantly change, so it would be impossible to reflect that in some binding agreement.