For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):
- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)
- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).
- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).
I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.
I would add that there are also cases where it’s the other way around—where the employer actually insists that employees work only a set number of hours (X), but the staff voluntarily puts in additional time (Y) without tracking it.
In fact, I’ve seen this happen more often in European companies than situations where employers pressure staff to work longer hours.
Tracking time of people in shit call center jobs, or with highly repeatable tasks is very straight forward.