3 ms·

> My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort. Where do you live? Is that common w

> My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort. Where do you live? Is that common where you are? In my experience, my contracts in the UK have always had some kind of language about working hours. E.g. my current contract has a clause saying "Your working hours will be from 9:00AM to 6:00PM from Monday to Friday (inclusive) with a one-hour break for lunch." In practice, I work from home and no-one is checking my exact hours, but I'm pretty sure that most if not all of my previous tech jobs have had a clause like that in their contracts.

ineedasername 4y ago
I work in the US. My contract reappointment letter-- essentially the mew contract in effect as of my reappointment after annual review-- is basically a paragraph that says "blah blah reappointed for next you subject to available funding blah blah" and I sign it and send to hr. I just checked the employee handbook to be sure, and there's nothing about standard work hours/break etc. Probably because most workers are in a union where the union contract spells out some of those things in more detail. But I'm not in a union, I'm an exempt "unlimited" employee which essentially means I do not have a set amount of hours I'm obligated to work. I'm obligated to work the hours required to perform the work I receive. In theory the expectation is a person will mainly have about 40 hours of work to do, and in practice that sometimes there will be crunch time and you'll have to do a bit more and you can't complain or ask for overtime. With respect to OE, it seems perfectly reasonable that this be double edged, and should I accomplish all expected tasks in < 40 hours I'm no more obligate to work longer than my employer is obligated to pay me more when I exceed 40 hours. In all honesty though, my work does roughly take 40 hours to complete, my job there's always more to be done that time allows and my boss & I work together to prioritize without any expectation that I regularly go over 40 unless something either 1) goes horribly wrong or 2) comes out of nowhere and needs to be addressed ASAP. There's some, but not complete, overlap between #1 nd #2. All of which is to say that I can easily see how someone could meet the average expectations of a job in much less than 40 hours, especially at $Large_Company where employees are interchangeable widgets and 40 hours is the socially defined amount of time that a least-common-denominator person meeting the minimum requirements needs to complete the job's tasks. I'm fascinated by this (new) concept, but I'm absolutely not looking to jump over into the OE world. There is enough ethical murkiness that I'm just not interested even if I think a person could, if careful navigate that path. I also like my current job and, as I said, have a backlog of work. I'm in a position of high responsibility of critical importance and it is not the sort of job where I'm only expected to do a discrete pre-define chunk of work each week/month/etc. So I would very much feel bad and unethical if I cut into it's time to do some other work. But I can see how that's not true of all jobs.

ineedasername 4y ago

I work in the US. My contract reappointment letter-- essentially the mew contract in effect as of my reappointment after annual review-- is basically a paragraph that says "blah blah reappointed for next you subject to available funding blah blah" and I sign it and send to hr. I just checked the employee handbook to be sure, and there's nothing about standard work hours/break etc. Probably because most workers are in a union where the union contract spells out some of those things in more detail. But I'm not in a union, I'm an exempt "unlimited" employee which essentially means I do not have a set amount of hours I'm obligated to work. I'm obligated to work the hours required to perform the work I receive. In theory the expectation is a person will mainly have about 40 hours of work to do, and in practice that sometimes there will be crunch time and you'll have to do a bit more and you can't complain or ask for overtime. With respect to OE, it seems perfectly reasonable that this be double edged, and should I accomplish all expected tasks in < 40 hours I'm no more obligate to work longer than my employer is obligated to pay me more when I exceed 40 hours. In all honesty though, my work does roughly take 40 hours to complete, my job there's always more to be done that time allows and my boss & I work together to prioritize without any expectation that I regularly go over 40 unless something either 1) goes horribly wrong or 2) comes out of nowhere and needs to be addressed ASAP. There's some, but not complete, overlap between #1 nd #2. All of which is to say that I can easily see how someone could meet the average expectations of a job in much less than 40 hours, especially at $Large_Company where employees are interchangeable widgets and 40 hours is the socially defined amount of time that a least-common-denominator person meeting the minimum requirements needs to complete the job's tasks. I'm fascinated by this (new) concept, but I'm absolutely not looking to jump over into the OE world. There is enough ethical murkiness that I'm just not interested even if I think a person could, if careful navigate that path. I also like my current job and, as I said, have a backlog of work. I'm in a position of high responsibility of critical importance and it is not the sort of job where I'm only expected to do a discrete pre-define chunk of work each week/month/etc. So I would very much feel bad and unethical if I cut into it's time to do some other work. But I can see how that's not true of all jobs.