At least here in Finland when you are salaried for the standard 37.5h work week (7.5h work day with 30min lunch break) if you work more then that you log the hours as overtime and get paid for them or in some form of "flex" time that you turn into vacation days or money (there are limits to how many hours of flex you can have banked up)
I know some smaller companies/start ups work around this but they can very easily get in trouble as doing that is illegal (as in if even a single employee complains to the authorities about not being paid for overtime they are fucked)
Because nobody on the better paid fields would take such a contract. You could try it but you would most likely lose in the market place of jobs by all the best employees going somewhere else.
As to why having a contract that pays you for the standard work week always I think people just like the security of getting roughly the same amount of money each month (or biweekly or however often you get paid). Especially once you have some money so you have mortgages, loans and credit cards to manage on top of your monthly bills.
Also the hours beyond the normal work week are overtime and come with multipliers for your effective hourly rate so companies try to do their best to arrange things so that minimal amount of overtime is actually done.
The point of salaries was to pay employees by the week instead of by the hour. My first job had a weekly timecard that consisted of a checkbox: "Did you work this week?"
Now, every job I have requires me to account for all my hours, so it seems like the only reason I am not a wage employee is to avoid paying me 150% base rate for hours worked beyond the first 40 in a calendar week.
Because that's what the salary is for. You work a certain amount of hours per week, they pay a certain amount of money per month, as well as some vacation money in May, and there's no need to keep track of the details. Hourly pay makes more sense with more flexible hours or if the worker wants to carry their own entrepreneurial risk (which is what I do; I'm self-employed and bill by the hour). Many people don't want to be self-employed, though. They just want a steady paycheck.
A very common problem for hourly workers, for example in the food service industry, is that they don't "get" enough hours in a certain week or month. They would be willing and available to work more, but there is not enough work/shifts for them to earn what they need.
Of course it goes both ways, the employer can also not be sure how much they will be available to work for him and needs to reschedule constantly.
I dunno. The direct translation of "salaried" to Finnish is "kuukausipalkallinen" and/or "palkallinen" (which is what it says in my current contract). Which basically means monthly paid or just paid. This is the "default" way of getting paid for your work. We have separate system of hourly paid called "tuntipalkallinen" (again a direct translations tunti==hour and palkallinen==paid)
I think this comes down to the employment law here in Finland. Working more then 40 hours a week is basically illegal unless you get compensated for those extra hours. There are some exceptions:
* owners (duh...) and their family members (family businesses)
* C level employees
* work you do at home wholly (if your company has a office the employee visits a couple times a year is enough for you to not be included in this)
* churches religious employees (priests etc. not the janitor)
* military/border control has their own special way of doing it
* some jobs have 120 hours every 3 weeks way of counting this
As a side note:
Maybe we just don't have the same concept as "salaried" in our language at all (at least I can't come up with one). Closest would be "urakkapalkka" which is basically contract work (as in I will build you this website that you want for X euros. Doesn't matter if it takes 1 hour or 100 hours because we already agreed on the price). No you are not allowed to abuse the contract work way of doing it by having "he will work for our company every week day for as long as we cancel this for as much time as it takes to get shit done"
Only legal way that I know of for getting around this is starting your own one man company and being a consultant. But then it is a contract between 2 companies and a whole lot of protections in both directions go away. Also you most likely need a lawyer to get a "good" contract and handle all the taxes, pension, etc by yourself (this is pretty much automated here in Finland for normal employees).
true though as an English language site most would assume Anglo Saxon derived employment law - I know one member of a major UK union executive who would be deeply offended to be thought of as some one who got paid OT
At least here in NZ, the core difference between salary and wages is that when you have a salaried job, you talk about yearly income, and when you have a wage job, you talk about hourly.
The no fixed hours and no overtime thing seems to be an American thing.
At least here in Finland when you are salaried for the standard 37.5h work week (7.5h work day with 30min lunch break) if you work more then that you log the hours as overtime and get paid for them or in some form of "flex" time that you turn into vacation days or money (there are limits to how many hours of flex you can have banked up)
I know some smaller companies/start ups work around this but they can very easily get in trouble as doing that is illegal (as in if even a single employee complains to the authorities about not being paid for overtime they are fucked)