But this is what you are paid for. Do you not feel that this is what you should be doing in the time you are contracted to work?
With that said, I'd find it hard to work such a short week. The time I spend that's unaccounted for, I tend to spend helping other people at my workplace, learning new stuff, etc. I enjoy the work. Granted, I don't work as a programmer.
Americans keep saying this means "no contract", but I don't get it. You probably have some weird American-only meaning attached to the word "contract" that doesn't apply to the rest of the world, in English as well as other languages. To the rest of us, "a contract" means a formal (usually written) agreement to exchange goods or services for payment. I find it utterly hard to believe that any full-time professional, even in America, is employed without having any piece of paper signed by their employer -- and they a copy signed by him -- that states basically "John Doe and Corporation X agree that John shall work full-time for X, and receive a salary of $Y per month".
If you do, that's a contract. If you don't, how do you know how much of a salary you're going to get at the end of the month? How does HR / Accounts know how much to pay you?
Of fucking course you have a contract. It's just that the terms for termination of that contract, whether specified within it or implicit because of "at will" legislation, are much more abrupt than most everywhere else. That doesn't make it not a contract.
> They do not count their hours, and are in fact not allowed to do so.
Like, if the company wants you to work 272 hours per week (hint: 24 × 7 = 168), you can't say you won't? Or is it the company that can't say anything if you show up three hours a month? Of course they count their hours, at least roughly. Everyone does.
Not that this has anything to do with whether something is a contract or not.
I never signed such a thing. Roughly a quarter century ago, I received a job offer letter with a salary level. I verbally accepted the offer. But my salary is much different today, and there's nothing with my signature on it to that effect. It's very loose and informal. The payroll software knows. This is at a huge and well managed company.
I have no doubt that the company's ability to cut my pay is constrained by regulations, like they probably have to inform me in advance. One of my employers once announced a furlough and temporary pay cut when there was a financial disaster. Nothing was signed.
About counting hours, this is a US thing. We have two classes of employees, depending on whether they are entitled to overtime pay or not. Most professionals are not. There are criteria for classifying employees, and one of them is whether they are required to work a specific number of hours.
Sure a company can say something if I show up 3 hours a month: "You're fired." Or they can cite a specific shortcoming in my performance. What I think is a sub-plot of this thread is that measuring this performance and tying it to a relative workload is not always straightforward.
Note that I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. A lot of it sounds strange because it is strange.
I'm forming a hypothesis -- i.e, vaguely guessing -- that this is American culture because employers have pushed it in this direction, because an absence of any paperwork for employees to point to in case of conflict benefits the employer.
> A lot of it sounds strange because it is strange.
America sure is. :-)
They can ask you to be at work at a certain time, or to do some task a certain number of hours a day, but they CANNOT pay you based on how many hours you spend doing it or they are in violation of labor laws (in the US anyway).