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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

Is everything hourly there? Would this work with salaried employees that don't log hours? Or maybe everyone does? A running joke in my first company out of school was "can't wait to see that overtime check!" whenever we saw someone working after 5. The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

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I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them.

That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.

Heh. At a $SOME_PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they literally disabled the option to log overtime in the portal, because workers were "getting confused", and the official policy was "no overtime".

Even 'salaried' in the UK means a contract that has a specified number of hours in it. In theory if you work more than that you should be getting either overtime or time in lieu, but in practice that might not always happen depending on your role in the company and the type of company.

I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.

Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Differs from country to country. In DE, salaried employees still have a number of hours/week in their contract (usually ~38) and are expected to log overtime and later take time in lieu. Max. permissible work hours per week is 48.

There are a bunch of exceptions for specific jobs.

The working hours, comp+ben etc. are usually determined by collective agreement with unions.

Pay for the same job can vary dramatically depending on which union your employer has a collective agreement with.

I know several people who got 25-30% pay rises just by moving to another part of the company that had an agreement with IG Metall instead of ver.di.

The economic solution again: you want your worker not to have to log hours because they have an important management job and work "as much as necessary"? Sure, pay them at least 125k a year. Anything under that, they must log hours.

>The implication is no one ever gets overtime as a salaried employee.

The flipside is that no one ever gets paid less as a salaried employee either, but most employees are too afraid of getting fired to remember that part. Any day that you work any portion, you get paid for the full day.

This is probably closer to the billing of on call staff than just "overtime".

For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.

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