For me, a weekend of manual labor is the biggest thing that makes me question my career choice… Worked on the yard yesterday (not planting pretty flowers or anything like that – land was abandoned for 15 years till we moved in during the winter, so we're doing the harder side of yard work) and was hoping to spend the day painting the old concrete block foundation/retaining wall today. When I get these opportunities to work outside with my back instead of my brain, I actually like it. 😛 And I've done “real” manual labor, too, just not this weekend (I swear my family remodeled every house we stepped foot into – my dad and us kids did everything from the ground up).
However, on the whole salaried-vs-hourly. I'm hourly and wish I was salaried. I think the key is to have a salary that equates to a fair hourly wage, but if you can get something fair, then salaried is – in my opinion – so much simpler! If I'm in the middle of a project when 4:30 rolls around (we take 1/2 hour lunch), then I can't just stay another 15 minutes to finish it up, cause that would be OT; I have to leave and then in the morning try to remember WTH I was doing. If I have to go get blood work done in the morning, I can't just go to the lab at 8 and get to work whenever I'm finished; I have to request off PTO in whole-hour increments, so if the lab gets me out by 8:15, I still have to wait till 9 to go in to work…and if I get stuck below slow traffic on a normal morning and don't get to work till 8:10, I'm late and have an attendance-issue. Or if traffic is clear and I get to work at 7:50, I can't clock in or start working because it will cause OT. I can't wait to not have to clock in!! I know that I'll still have to work my butt off, but I'd rather be working to get my work done than watching the clock to meet the time-punches.
But to make salary work, you have to get a fair salary. That can be difficult to figure it it can be done. The same negotiations are required for hourly, too, though. I just figured it up and 90 hours/wk year-round at minimum wage is $43,355. So, if you're making at least $44k working 90 hour weeks year-round, then they could legally pay you the same amount if you were hourly. (And the 90 hr wks are just for a few months anyway.) 70 hour weeks year-round they only have to pay you $32,045 to meet the legal hourly rate. So, if you're working any fewer hours than that or making any more money than that, being hourly wouldn't help any. If you're making less than minimum wage per hour worked (averaged over the year), then you might want to find a labor lawyer. Otherwise, it's still just a negotiation issue. I don't make as much as I could since I'm a CPA etc., but I don't think that is because I'm hourly, and I think that I'm evidence that being hourly doesn't fix anything. What fixes things is negotiating better. I'm not the greatest negotiator. I hope to do better with the negotiating next time. But I promise that if they make me salaried (which I hope is in the future…), I will make sure that my hourly pay works out to what I have currently, or I will turn it down. I don't care if I get another $200 a month if I have to work an extra 40 hours/month to get that!
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