An important compound to know if you work for money in Germany is Stundenlohn, made up of Stunde (hour) and Lohn (reward, wage, salary).
It is the famed hourly wage of the English speaking world. We will not go into the legal differences between Lohn and Gehalt (wage and salary) and other finer points of selling yourself for money.
Stundenlohn is the traditional basic unit of time based compensation, and even if you are a salaried worker, you will do a quick math to see what you make per hour in order to figure out if a job is worth doing and if your overachiever co-worker is worth his or her money, right?
The other traditional method of compensation is piece work, where you get paid based on discrete units of labor. These units can be everything quantifiable, from the number of words in a blog post or newspaper article to the pounds of strawberries picked and crated, from the number of chicken eviscerated to the number of drinking straws sold or the number of bricks laid.
Paying an hourly wage used to be a way to compensate people for performing work that was hard to break down into a volume per hour and that consisted of different activities. Take the job of receptionist for example. You took phone calls and forwarded them, sometimes after a lengthy conversation who the desired contact was, or after looking up a directory, or you established a telephone conference. You also attended to visitors and made badges (from simply writing down names on stickers to operating a camera and fancy software). You could be the point of contact for delivery people and the one who made sure there was an uninterrupted supply of hot coffee. And so forth.
The flexibility of hourly wage jobs had a drawback to the number crunchers. In the times of cigarette smoking employees, in case you are old enough to have lived through them, you will have seen the receptionist sneaking out for a cigarette on company time.
Enforcement of work time for receptionists was largely based on asshole visitors who bitched about the receptionist not stubbing out the cig within a second of Mr. Important walking in through glass doors worth ten years or more of the receptionist's wages.
Or based on the unpredictable schedule of the boss.
Even in the days of pen and paper, specialists would try to figure out how much work an hourly employee could perform in one hour. While reasonable for planning and costing, it was imprecise enough to leave a bit of breathing room, unless you worked in a sweatshop.
Ever increasing calls for efficiency and productivity, combined with better technology for capturing and measuring work have changed the nature of hourly work in many sectors.
While lawyers, for instance, are asked to document their billable hours, we have yet to see a task sheet for lawyers that says "Look up statute xx: 5 minutes 45 seconds".
On the other hand, such a task sheet is common across industries where the official mode of compensation is "hourly".
So, if you arrive in Germany and are offered a job that pays Stundenlohn, figure out what that really means.
Around here, Stundenlohn has often mutated into a "target wage" unrelated to the actual time worked.
For example, a friend works as a cleaner in a nearby factory for a Stundenlohn of 9.45 Euros. The catch: work is set up in such a way that it always takes longer than the 3.5 daily hours she gets paid. Fifteen minutes to half an hour more each day is the rule - without extra pay because 3.5 hours is the time calculated for the job.
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