> Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view I'm beginning to wonder the same. I don't really understand t

> Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view I'm beginning to wonder the same. I don't really understand the "job market" in the US or the regulations around it. Every time I hear or read something about it I get even more confused. > I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. That's the kind of employment contract I'm familiar with. > If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. That's one possibility. To take time in lieu. Another is to be paid overtime. They're both different ways of dealing with the same situation. > The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached Precisely the point I made prior as well. We seem to have a similar understanding of this. > most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that. Indeed. That's the point I raised in my first comment on this thread. > So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality. There's always an expectancy of output in any work relation. That said, if your pay is more tied to "doing work" for a certain amount of time, you're getting paid for that. Normally your output or some approximation of it will be used to determine better pay, or even whether you get to keep the job. Even if you get fired though, you're normally still given a notice period - and get paid for showing up during that. That's still selling your time, with an expectation of output.