Undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff are overworked: the extra hours are free to the company. It would be interesting to see how long "long hours" culture would last if every single staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be paid for. (Once we got past all the insistence that employees falsify timesheets, of course).
The flip side of that is that every extra hour you work, you are devaluing your own compensation by working for free.
Well, my friend decided to continue to pull crazy hours and every Friday afternoon at 4:30 (when the boss went home) he went up to the boss and said, "Here. Sign this. These are my hours for the week." They boss (not being too bright) just signed it week after week after week.
Eventually a year went by and my industrious friend went up to the HR department and said, "Here are all of my time sheets for the year. My boss agreed to giving me time off in lieu. Here's his signature on every sheet. I've put in 80 hours a week for a year. Now I want a year off".
Of course they couldn't give it to him. After consulting with their lawyer they gave him time and a half (pro rated on his salary). Then they went to our boss and made a special rule for our team. Nobody was to work overtime again. Ever.
Everybody was happy. Except for my boss :-)
When I used to sling burgers, etc, my employers would regularly retroactively clock me out for breaks I wasn't allowed to take. We were clocked out when our shifts were supposed to have ended, regardless of when we were allowed to leave.
It was normal to work 10-12 hours and get paid for 7 (at $4.75 & $5.15, none-the-less). If you report it, you're fired and blacklisted.
While I was under 18, I would be clocked out at 11pm on any school weeknight (state law). The catch was that I was on closing shift, so I couldn't leave (locked doors) until we were through -- usually ~1am. 2 hours per-night unpaid, plus a 30 minute deduction from my pay for a break I was never allowed to take.
All of that is illegal under a variety of state and federal laws. However, enforcement of those laws is either non-existent or is a tiny slap on the wrist ($500 fine for stealing an aggregate of ~$10,000 in wages over a year in the case of one place I worked at that was finally caught).
I'm getting on a tangent, but my main point is unpaid extra work is rampant among hourly employees as well as salaried.
I completely agree with your premise, but I think we'd see the same problems come up in a different form. Fixing that problem requires putting at least some bargaining power back in the hands of employees, and that's difficult in most places.
Yeah. It's the other kind of "black" economy, where profit relies on defrauding the employees because they have no power. The people doing it probably tell themselves and their friends that they're making money through hard work and the virtue of long hours.
The extra hours are NOT free to the company.
Ok they don't pay for them in money, but also don't gain anything in additional work being done. In the extreme case they loose productivity, people get sick, people quit etc, which is a very real cost for the company.