Maybe I'm misreading, but it seems you're looking at the work commitment from a perspective of "signing up to do a set amount of hours," whereas others are look

Maybe I'm misreading, but it seems you're looking at the work commitment from a perspective of "signing up to do a set amount of hours," whereas others are looking at it from a perspective of "signing up to do a set amount of tasks." While full-time work is 40 hours of work per week by convention, as a salaried employee, I'm not really paid by the hour, right? I'm paid to get what I'm supposed to do done correctly and on time. There may be some weeks I do have more than 40 hours of work to do, but there may be others when I have less. I don't get paid more in the exceptionally busy weeks, but I don't get paid less in the relatively light weeks, either. So, when you write, > my understanding of the contract with an employer is that if someone is purposely doing less work than they've committed to, that's not good. My take is that we're not talking about that -- we're talking about people doing all the work they have committed to in less time than expected. I am being paid to write and maintain documentation for a software product; my success at that task is not directly measured by the hours that I put in. Now, if you're being paid for a full-time job and you're consistently able to do all your work in 20 hours a week or less, this is probably a warning sign -- either you're not communicating to your employer that they're not giving you enough work, or the employer simply doesn't have enough work for you. In the former case, you may eventually be seen as not pulling your weight even if you're technically doing everything you're asked to do, and in the latter, your company may decide that they just don't have enough work to keep paying you -- or the company may be in trouble. I have experienced all of those things at various points (including being let go after a short time because I "wasn't proactive" in trying to get people to give me work, which was not entirely true from my perspective, although in retrospect I was a lousy fit for that job). But, I've also been positions where work was effectively cyclical. There were periods where I was working a lot and periods where there just wasn't much stuff in the pipeline yet. While the answer to your last hypothetical is "yes, I'd feel cheated," I'd also feel cheated if the employer adjusted my salary down during weeks they only had 20 hours of work a week for me to do. To bring this around to the original thread, I think the problem with "two full-time remote jobs I'm at concurrently" is that even if you're being paid for the tasks rather than the hours, there is a commitment of availability. Even as a technical writer, I need to be available to answer questions and work on unexpected high-priority tasks, even hot fixes -- that's part of what I'm on salary for.