salary vs hourly has upsides or downsides depending on the culture of the organization.

In my industry, you can tell who is on salary by the weariness in their voice.

Can you take a day off when sick and get paid for it? Sure, in theory. But good luck extracting yourself from your workload, even if sick.

Anonymous wrote:You're not "actually paid for" 40 hours, you're paid for the number of hours you take to get your job done, whether it's 20 or 60. Salaried work has a lot of upsides compared to hourly work, so of course there will be downsides as well.

I wish. I used to work at a large federal contractor as a salaried engineer. If you worked more than 40 hours, you better only put 40 hours on your timesheet; they were adamant that we not show any overtime.

Unfortunately, my program was winding down and there wasn't enough funding to keep us all working through the end of the year. For a couple months I worked my full days (the work still had to get done) but my timesheet only showed between 10 and 30 hours per week, which resulted in getting paid a lot less than my regular salary. The economy was at the low point in the recession, so I took what I could get. I know they wanted us all to quit but I needed the money so they eventually laid me off, which seemed to make management angry because I filed for unemployment.

Pay you like a salaried employee when it suits them, pay you like an hourly employee when it suits them. "Employees are our most important asset" and all that crap.