Developer on Call

" all work necessary outside these times, including Saturday and Sunday, is already remunerated in the base salary."

That's actually not enforceable in most US states. Typically a base salary cannot cover work which is outside normal business hours if it's a consistent expectation that work will be performed outside normal business hours. Contracts are enforceable because both parties are given "due consideration", so that the terms are intended to be mutually beneficial. As written, what you described is basically saying "Do more work, do it outside typically expected times to perform work, and you're not getting anything more for doing this."

As an example of how this works, in a situation in which you will work consistently outside normal business hours but are a salaried employee, such as a manager supervising an overnight crew at a manufacturing facility, you will be awarded "Shift Differential Pay", which is a percentage or dollar amount differential above and beyond normal pay for someone of your position at the company as "due consideration" for agreeing to work outside normal business hours. This would be true for your overnight crew on the line as well, except that it's included in their hourly.

Being salaried does not automatically mean you are a slave to the company and their whims, and being overtime exempt does not mean you can be asked to consistently work outside normal business hours week after week without any additional compensation. Overtime is an occasional action, if you are being asked to work outside normal business hours as a standard operating practice, that's something else entirely.

I would argue that on-call shouldn't exist at all. If a company wants a system to be supported 24/7 it should have three eight hour shifts. Of course companies balk at this, saying it's too expensive, but if their product isn't worth paying extra for then perhaps it's also not worth being up 24/7.

This is the sort of thing that should be enforced by law or by a strong union contract because businesses can't be trusted to act in their employees' best interests.

The other thing is that you get familiar with the "type" of problems that arise. This helps you communicate with customer support when they call, or know what questions to ask to get to their issues.

I've had customer support complain about an issue or feature request they have never told us about but have had pain points and customer requests for months. It is always a trivial change. Improving communication between customer support staff developers is hugely valuable however it happens.

A few ideas, not in any specific order:

It would kill start-ups, wouldn't it? If you have to obey union rules, you can't have one person who's the DBA and the project lead and the primary programmer and and and because those are all different jobs and require different union employees. Great if you're Microsoft and can afford it, but otherwise...

What would it do to Open Source and Free Software? Can it be Union-Certified if it's made by people who aren't all being paid? If a company has to Look For The Union Label, as the song goes, is it going to be allowed to use software which comes from outside the corporate sphere?

Related to the above, what would happen to hobbyist programming? Would it be regulated out of existence entirely, or merely relegated to people writing software nobody's allowed to use because it was made off-the-clock?