this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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Although I agree with what everyone is saying "that it make sense to compensate workers for the commute in time and money", I'd like to nuance a little, because I think it is a bit more complicated from a moral standpoint: Imagine employer were paying for your commute and you were on the clock during it, what happen when you move to another appartment/house further from work ? Should the employer continue to pay and clock your longer commute ? It seems weird that my decision to move to another part of the city would affect my employer. The consequence would be that employer will mandate that you cannot move without their appoval or that their cost for your commute is fixed in the contract and need to be renegociable. In the end what it boils down to is not that commute should be paid for and part of the work day. What people want is better salaries and smaller hours. Then the commute doesn't matter anymore, and stays at the expense of the worker who can therefore move wherever they want.
Because employers have never forced indirect layoff by changing a person's office location without agreement to make them quit instead of being fired.
exactly, this is a non issue. if someone wants to go through the immense hassle and expense of moving just to get like 30mins more pay daily, ok
What people also want is to work from home if possible.
To stay out of the adult kindergarten managers desperately want to put people into for reasons entirely unrelated to productivity.
Paying for the commute would be the boss paying the cost of the unnecessary demand for repeated physical presence.
The programmers especially on my team agree with you 200%
My team works from four locations in three states, two time zones. We work on the computer, we meet on Teams, we chat on Teams. Occasionally we phone reach other
The other IT people are happy to be in the office occasionally to catch up with others in the office, the programmers overall don't
So they commute typically about an hour each way on days they must be in the office to work exactly as they do at home and have about as much social contact
Some of them are quite unhappy with the situation
Paying for commute expense is already a solved problem.
Some examples, a fixed amount based on data provided every month for commute. (200 dollars a month or whatever)
Or if a company wants to be both stingy and generous at the same time, make you expense your gas or public transportation every month up to a certain limit.
It doesn't matter if you move to a different part of town. The cost is negligible to a business.
The expense half may be cheap, but does the time count as wages? That could be non trivial.
In my case, I leave the house an hour before work, but I have some errands I run. When does my "commute" begin? If I wanted to cheat and bump my pay, drive to a park and ride near work and show up on the bus, which wouldn't be that much longer than normal. Then show my employer the public transit route from my house that would have a 2.5 hour transit time, and claim the extra 3-4 hours as pay.
It's such a tricky gray area. On the one hand it is unfair to lose hours to a commute on your own time, on the other it creates ways to cheat the system that should be difficult to audit, unless I give my employer permission to track me, which seems unreasonable.
Yes, we all must suffer because Dave was a slimy fuck and lied about his commute that one time. /s
So many good things we decide not to do because Dave might fuck it up.
Or actually, because racism, but we don't want to admit that and blame a hypothetical Dave instead.
It is not tricky at all. Again the commuting cost is a solved issue and not even the one discussed in the article.
No one pays you by the hour to commute to work. This is not a thing.
I admit I'm not paying to read the full article, but that seems to be exactly what the article is saying, does the workday start when you get to work or when you start the commute?
I'll agree I've never heard someone seriously chase commute as work hours, but this article suggests it is a thing, so I was commenting on that context.
Where I live, I have to calculate (and show the process of calculation) the cheapest cost of getting to and back from work from my house. My boss simply pays me that much each workday. If I move, I have to do this calculation again. It doesn't matter how long it takes me to get to work (i.e. I'm not "on the clock"), they are simply imbursing me for that part.
Ironically, sometimes moving further away is both cheaper and faster.
See that's the problem, in America this needs to be solved without asking people to do math.
It is for most companies. You put the drive into a mileage calculator for your company and they reimburse you a certain amount per mile. You don't do napkin math, they need legitimate records for accountants, audits, etc.