Wages And Salaries

Concerning hourly wages and annual salaries, there is sometimes an assumption made that the latter is the objectively better type of compensation (perhaps moreso because of the prestige perceived to accompany it).  With an hourly wage, one is paid at a set rate per hour, with the number of hours potentially shifting from week to week or month to month.  With a salary, the annual compensation total remains the same, though sometimes one might work more or less than the customary 40 hour full-time American workweek.  As will be dissected soon below, there are trade-offs regardless of which way one is paid, though culture has conditioned some people to automatically seek or celebrate one over the other.

The only basic alternatives have their own potential drawbacks.  One is task-based wages, which combine elements of a standard hourly wage translated to an individual assignment/objective with the rigid cap of a salary despite the number of hours worked—while completing tasks quickly could make this a very profitable form of pay, a task could take so long that the pay per hour actually worked is no longer excellent.  The other is commissions, which entail someone being paid based on their success in, for instance, selling an item—meaning someone could work laboriously for long durations and receive little to no pay if their performance does not lead to the intended outcome.  Such alternate forms of compensation could themselves be combined with some baseline salary or hourly rate or be the sole compensation granted (which makes commission-only pay inherently predatory).  However, regardless of what exact form of compensation one has, the capacity for exploitation is always present.

While some idiotic but popular ideas about the workplace are being increasingly rejected by a frustrated populace, salaries might still be regarded as superior to wages by default, as if they inevitably are higher than wages.  Even more erroneously, some might assume that people who earn salaries deserve more respect or commendation than those who earn wages.  But logic reveals the non sequiturs of each of these ideas.

Wages do not have to be low.  As uncommon as it might be, it is not impossible for someone to be paid $60, $80, or a host of other such amounts for each hour of their labor.  Someone could have a wage of $400 or more an hour, an incredibly high hourly amount, but could they live off of this in contemporary America if they only had one hour of work each week, or one hour every pay period (typically two weeks)?  No, not without assistance of one kind or another!  The hours of an employee earning a wage are crucial and not simply the wage itself, though wages can be far better than abysmal.  There is nuance of various kinds that appears to often be overlooked as some clamor for prestigious salaries with a high dollar amount or falsely conflate salaried compensation with a comfortable work environment or financial stability.

Salaries can potentially be low; nothing about salary requires that an employee with this form of compensation is paid as much as or more than one with an hourly wage.  An employer could also make working technically unpaid overtime a requirement of sorts, lest they fire someone for not complying with "business needs".  Since a salary remains stable, the hours worked can fluctuate, but a fixed salary does not increase when someone works additional hours each day or additional days each week to accommodate pressures from employers.  Even if they are compensated well, salaried workers can certainly be exploited.  Their free time could be diminished significantly, and if their salary is not at least livable to begin with, then they have a worse arrangement than many workers with hourly wages.

Pursuing a salary over a wage just to have a salary disregards pivotal aspects of the nature of compensation.  While the former may provide a measure of stability from one payday to another, there is no other inherent benefit of a salary for anyone who receives it.  They might make less than someone else who receives an hourly wage, but they aspire to look down on people who do not have a certain kind of job, stooping to an asinine error adjacent to classism.  It is not as if having a salary necessitates that one is bound to be more financially well off than a worker who earns wages.  Another point of relevance to how some approach this issue is that they might only believe that a salary can be less monetarily advantageous than hourly wages on the basis of personal experience.

That is, they have observed a situation or salary listing where the salary was presented as lower than what they have seen wages presented as in another situation.  In this case, concrete, happenstance examples from personal experience are prioritized over the transcendent truths of logic.  Such a person could realize from logic alone that there is nothing intrinsically better about salaries than wages, but that is precisely the problem: the many non-rationalists of the world believe things, whether illogical or correct, due to assumptions instead of logical truth.  Then, certain non-rationalists try to fit into a society operating on these assumptions and often on obvious errors, which compels some to look down on others who hold a particular job or have a given style of compensation.  What these people really want is to be respected on irrelevant grounds or to be accepted by a culture of fools.