I agree, working by the hour is pointless. When someone tries to pay me by the hour I think it's a joke. They want me to keep track of all the time I stare at the wall and day dream before my mind wanders back to what the project is? And the 4 pages of doodling that are inevitably going to occur before I draw anything productive? Because if I only get paid for the time I'm productive who's going to pay me for the time it takes to get ready to be productive?

I'm not sure that works in retail. Customers aren't completely predictable. Today my store was dead but last Wednesday I was swamped, but only in the morning, and the usual lunch rush never showed.

With a desk job I completely agree with that idea which is why most desk jobs are salary instead of hourly, but on the same note, you can't complain if it takes 12 hours a day for a week to finish a project. Most people would agree with this idea as long as it means less time at work, as soon as something becomes too challenging and requires more time and attention than 40hrs/week, suddenly their pay isn't fair and they want more.

The bottom line is most people will always think they deserve more pay for less work regardless of the structure. But do you really want to live in France?

Another question I have is how many jobs really are task-based? I mean, people who need step-by-step directions are usually pretty cheap employees, and those are the only ones who could have a specific number of tasks to accomplish every day, right?

Interestingly, but I agree with the post and the 3rd comment.
There is another problem when you're not the boss: you could be payed less if a task is estimated as being easy to do, but actually it's very difficult.

The first problem is that you are being far to rational and reasoned in your argument. People don't work like that. May i draw your attention to the classic Hawthorne Studies of the Bank Wiring Room of Westinghouse Corp. The upshot proved to be that changing in variables matters less than the being shown interest by others - as in "value me".

And then there is the "Protestant Work Ethic" which distils down to you have to find work tough, if it isn't hard then it's not proper work.

As my father used to tell me, "Don't sit down on the job, it's not supposed to be easy". i never could work out that sort of mentality.

So, expect work to be tough; expect it to be least likeable; expect it to be inconvenient; expect to be at everyones beck and call (even if you are the boss). Feel like you are suffering and stressed out of your tree. Got all those? Good, then you are working. Kinda odd view, ain't it?

Agree! I work at a place which shall remain nameless for now (nationwide, everyone knows it). We have 2 sets of employees doing virtually the same job, but they belong to different unions, so they are treated differently on pay.

One group is salaried, and if they go over eight hours, they get time and a half based on their salary (you know Salary/2080=hourly rate).

The other group has their task evaluated every two years. Based on the amount of time their task takes during this evaluation period, their task is rated, and their pay is based solely upon that rating. (We can give them extra tasks, but we have to pay them for it.)

Surpisingly enough, the "hourly" employees regularly use 10-15% OT.

The Evaluated employees regularly take less time than what their job was evaluated at, because once their done, they get to go home. They get their $xxx per day whether it takes 2 hours or 12 hours.

I sure hope upper management figures out a way to get everyone working on the evaluated side. We could save billions.

I just stumbled onto your blog from Slashdot. Really interesting content. Anyway, I totally agree with this article. And I feel this very well may be the future of how work is scheduled. I'd definitely love this type of job more; I do work for my dad and get paid $10/hr. Now sometimes I'm doing something such as setting up something for him on his network that takes me literally fifteen minutes. To make it easy I always round to the nearest fifteen minutes while clocking in. (They are equal to $2.50.) That means that I would get paid $2.50 for something that very well could be the difference between life and death for his company. Now this type of thing is negotiated because as I have said he's my father. But were I NOT working for him and were in the same situation, this would not be good. I also have some times when I need to load up a computer with his customized Linux distribution. That will take a few hours, and isn't extremely essential. Do I want to be paid less? Of course not, but even I feel that getting paid $30 to set up one computer can be a bit ridiculous. Further, even though a lot of it is waiting, I doubt most bosses would allow me to take a walk to the Pizza store next door, eat a slice, and come back without clocking out even if my work is doing itself.