Hourly Work Against Salaried Work

A sound and thorough grasp of logic is useful in all endeavors, not merely in investigating the deep waters of explicit metaphysics or epistemology.  As such, even the more "practical" aspects of life can be approached with clarity in light of reason.  There are myths, after all, about practical things like business in the same way that there are myths about the more existential, metaphysical elements of reality (not that practical beliefs and philosophical beliefs are separate, of course).

One such myth about business relates to pay structures.  Hourly work is often perceived as inferior to salaried work, in large part due to the fact that salaried pay is fixed over a set period of time, whereas, while pay per hour is fixed, the hours a person works might fluctuate.  After accounting for the fact that both hourly and salaried positions can come with benefits, it becomes clear that neither pay structure is inherently better in itself.  One or the other can still be an objectively better fit for a particular person in a particular life context, however.

Although salaries are often regarded as inherently superior to wages, more than one variable determines which of the two is the financially superior option.  Since a salary is inflexible (though bonuses or raises could be periodically applied, as with hourly pay) regardless of the amount of work done, accepting a salaried position can trap someone in a role that entails more responsibilities without pay that changes with the scope of weekly or monthly work.  Furthermore, it is far from impossible to make more money from hourly wages than from a salary!

Salaried positions can also disrupt one's "work-life balance" in ways that hourly work does not, requiring an increasingly invasive amount of attention that would have otherwise been directed to matters of personal or intellectual importance.  In the pursuit of corporate prestige, some people might be willing to sacrifice hobbies or the formation of new relationships.  As long as a given person does not sacrifice actual obligations--such as their friendships or marriage--there is nothing wrong with being immersed in the workplace, but there are many who have no desire to permit their jobs to infringe on other parts of their life.

Some people are simply more concerned with the superficial perceptions of status that are commonly associated with salaries than they are with either work-life balance or true financial benefits.  As with many other parts of modern life, the business world is full of shallowness--business itself is not shallow, but many businesspeople are.  Business, like all other things, must be examined without any assumptions if one wants to understand it properly.