On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.
I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him"
Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.
Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.
We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.
Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified.
I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more.
Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.
As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.
I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.
You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office.
It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.
Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.
They already do. I'll take a lower salary from a company that doesn't make me commute.
This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages.
If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.
- Covering the cost of a FastPass
- Deciding where to locate a new office based on where employees live
- Offering a company shuttle from a train station
- "Google Bus" and other similar initiatives
- Offering a potential employee a higher salary because of their long commute time
These things happen all the time, and all bring a portion of the commute cost into the company.
BTW I've never heard of a company moving for its employees' benefit, unless by "employees" you mean "senior management & board members".
If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.
I think a fairer deal would be if commute time counted against the typical 8 hours of work. That way everybody's interests would align around having short commute times.
Also, not all of the commute cost is the fault of the employer. For example, my commute is a lot shorter than many of my coworkers, because I place more importance on a short commute than a cheaper, bigger house further away. My coworkers value having a bigger house more, so they live where the housing is cheaper but the commute longer.
How would your price this in? Would the people who commute further get to work shorter hours, just because I chose to sacrifice for a closer commute?
I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit.
That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc.
Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.
If a congestion tax worked, the overall burden would go down, because businesses would work harder to locate offices near where employees are (or want to be). And they'd also likely get more active in things like housing and transit policy, because it would be to their direct financial benefit to make sure that development was more balanced.
My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture.
As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so.
I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.
Being remote might contribute to, or increase the risk of, not being effective, but it's not the most proximate cause.
I'm on the job market now and the most feedback I get are from jobs that would be 45 min - 1 hr minimum (in the same city). I've done it before, it's terrible for my health and mental state.
Moving closer isn't an option because it's even more expensive than the already expensive area I live in now and the salaries won't compensate to offset that.
Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct.
It would be a heck of a lot more efficient than combining a bunch of disincentives that affect the lower classes.
Why does nobody ever try free public transportation? Paying the poor brings a lot of practical issues, but at a minimum you can make them not pay for taking the long route.
Because someone has to pay for it.
While it's debatable whether remote works for businesses that can work remotely, it imposes costs on the rest of us, especially those who can't do their jobs over an Internet connection, and those costs should be paid by those who willingly incur them, not whoever they can push them off to.