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A true professional will show up to do his job and do it well. He will not fret about being asked to do something "off the clock".

"Asked"? This is not some informal request where your neighbor is asking you to give him a hand with a heavy package or something, this is a long-term commercial transaction where one party sells labor and the other buys it. Trying to apply the standards of the former to the latter is silly. Professional transactions ought to be handled in a professional manner -- each job requirement is paid for at the agreed rate.

The whole concept of "hourly worker" needs to be discarded. This is a throwback to the Industrial Age when most workers showed up in coveralls to punch a time clock and then waited for the noon whistle to blow for lunch like a bunch of robots.

This is the 21st Century.

How about just getting a weekly salary to do a job. This does not always mean nice and neat 8 hour days with an hour for lunch. Sometimes you need to work 12 hours during a crunch time. Other times, you might be able to slip out a little early. It balances out and the job gets done without all the overhead of payroll administrators, lawyers and such.

Some of our most successful companies have done away with the time clock and their employees are on salary - with performance bonuses so that they are financially motivated to get the job done well and efficiently.

Some innovative companies are even doing things like doing away with tracking vacation/sick time.

For example, Netflix offers all their employees unlimited vacation time. Yes, you heard that right. If they are sick, they take a vacation day. If they want to travel to France, they take two weeks of vacation.

Now you might think that employees would take advantage of this and take enormous amounts of vacation but this simply did not turn out to be the case. In fact, the employees take an average of about 2 1/2 weeks of vacation, even though they could take much more if they wanted to.

This is because Netflix treats their employees as adults and they instill in their workforce a positive working environment that induces in the employees a desire to do the job well. People actually like coming to work and while they take a vacation now and then, they are committed to their employer.

One thing they aren't doing is hollering like a bunch of pussies because they had to spend a few minutes waiting to get through some security checkpoint.

Time to discard old models and move into the 21st Century.