That is correct. When I was a photojournalist, I avoided work for hire when possible because it resulted in all of my outakes belonging to the publication. I did do work for hire when I did inconsequential stuff like specialized industrial shoots, but all my news stuff was explicitly not work for hire. The result was I retained rights for my outtakes (which at the end of the 1990s resulted in significant stock income from NBA, the 1996 presidential campaign and other big value news and celebrity stuff.) I actually paid for most of my university with just stock residuals.

My general agreement with Reuters was I got paid a day rate plus expenses and they had the rights to the specific images I delivered. (For a typical NBA game, I might ship at most two images for the night.) Just for clarity, since Reuters is a fast-moving wire service, they don't want fifty images, it was left to the photographer to ship only a 'best' image so as not to clog the picture desk in DC with a massive stream of noise (imagine 20 NBA games in one night with 100 images each -- it makes editing on deadline a massive task, so the photographers were expected to only deliver what was actually needed.)

Things might have changed a bit; my last Reuters assignment was in 2002.

So, at least in photography, work for hire can be very expensive due to effectively having zero IP at the end of the job.