I am not so sure about that. I can speak from my own personal experience. I have always had fixed number of hours in the contract without any operator. Currently, 38.5 hours per week. Labor law even says I cannot have more than 44h per week, or similar, not sure about that. And I think this is in general true in many EU countries. Don’t know much about the rest of the world.
We're at an impasse, then, because I'm only an expert in American labor economics. I would suggest doing a quick search in the econ literature because someone should have done this analysis for somewhere in Europe.
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