This has been litigated in the past, and rejected on the theory that the employer doesn't mandate where you live, so they length of commute is effectively the employee's choice.

I love these interpretations. They're at the same time literally true, but completely out of touch with reality. I guess a minimum wage worker at a fast food joint in Manhattan is free to choose to live right next to his job, am I right?

Live right next to their job in Manhattan as in being homeless, I guess.

You understand that you don't actually have to live in Manhattan if your career goal is to work in a fast food joint, right?

Contrived hypotheticals don't actually address the issue under discussion.

There are, in fact, fast food restaurants in Manhattan.

Anyone know if they pay better than ones elsewhere? Or what other things enable them to recruit staff?

Glassdoor.com suggests that McDonald's in NYC pays crew members and cashiers about $36-37k/year and managers around $129k/year.

The national minimum wage of $7.25/hour works out to about $12k/year, so that's about three times as much.

New York State has a higher minimum wage, $14.20/hour. That works out to about $24k/year, so NYC McDonalds is still paying considerably more.

Wow. For contrast, central London McDonalds is paying about 10 GBP per hour for crew - which is the UK legal minimum wage and as of today equivalent to 12 USD.

The counterpoint gets far more absurd. Should you expect to be able to move to a different state and have the employer fly you to work and back each day, or would that be entirely unreasonable?

It's not an unsolvable problem. Free bus passes for people who live close enough to ride a bus, and some kind of sliding scale beyond that.

Or look up the national average or industry average or metropolitan area average commute time/distance, and build something around that.

Or give a $1000 stipend to every employee to either spend on gas for daily commutes or two flights a year to come visit.

Could certainly figure something out if there was sufficient motivation to do so.

The employer could choose not to employ anyone who lives more than X distance away. Many already do.

On top of this, Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk (2014) found that employers do not need to compensate workers for time spent waiting in line for security screenings. At the time, some workers were spending 2.5hrs/week in lines before and after their shifts.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-supreme-cou...

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/integrity-staffi...

Those cases are about a decade old, and I believe they would have been overturned (at least in CA) by a recent CA Supreme Court case: https://shawlawgroup.com/2020/02/california-supreme-court-ap...

This however always has been on the basis that a job couldn’t be done from anywhere

But the law could be changed. Or unions could negotiate those policies.

> the employer doesn't mandate

But employers do mandate where you live by not allowing you to live in their office. Therefore commuting is not a choice it’s a requirement. Even if you live across the road you still need to spend time going to work and back.

Twitter actually tried to provide accommodations in their offices recently and ran into issues because of zoning and permitting. Some occupations (i.e. firefighters, doctors) do have short-term accommodation on the premises. It's complicated and may not be entirely down to decisions by the employer is my overall point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/07/twitter-s...

It is not complicated at all, if you do it during the construction stage. The thing is, you can't just randomly turn office suites into bedrooms like that.

Commercial buildings have different structural integrity, plumbing requirements, accessibility requirements, fire defense requirements, and so on compared to residential housing. A space that might be deemed safe to have 100 people working inside of, may not be deemed safe to have 10 people sleeping inside of for those reasons.

And that is to some degree also fair. Both sides have a point in this discussion.

I love this idea generally. How, though, do you account for different people with the same job description living at different distances?

As a thought experiment, Alice and Bob are both security and network engineers that work in the server cage. Alice lives with three roommates next door to the office; Bob has a spouse, three children, and a dog, and the only place he can afford to live imposes a four-hour commute each way. Alice is thus able to spend eight hours each day on her defined job duties, while Bob expends his entire workday driving.

Come time for performance reviews, Alice will (presumably) appear to have had much greater efficacy than Bob, despite Bob having expended the same amount of time on the job.

How does Bob avoid being fired for living somewhere more affordable?

(That Bob’s life is a road-bound living hell is not intended to be in scope for this argument.)

Additionally, who would verify where does Bob actually live? Maybe he also lives next door to the office but told the employer he lives 4 hours away? Very interesting idea but impractical.

I think that the remote vs onsite aspect eventually will be implicitly factored into the salary by the market.

Onsite jobs will need to pay more to have people come to the office and trade their free time for commuting.

Fully remote jobs will be able to pay less because people would see that as an added bonus.

Wouldn't you have a maximum you are willing to pay for commuting expressed as a percentage of your compensation, rely on background/credit check to flag accounts for probable fraud for HR to look into, and fire people you found defrauding your company?

Also anyone willing to commit a crime to pad their paycheck is probably doing other nefarious things so they want to dig a little deeper besides? This would be so trivial to uncover in most cases I can't imagine this would be a big deal.

I know. That's why I assume that it won't work. But let's take your scenario and run with it. :)

I assume for this thought exercise that that both Alice and Bob have WFH-compatible jobs.

Alice could move further away. Will that change her hours worked (under this scheme)? No.

Performance reviews, then, would need to be mandated to only consider actual work time.

The problem with mandating complex systems will always come down to the edge cases. Companies will optimize location when searching for employees. Should you make it illegal to ask about location during the hiring process? What happens if an employee moves? Does it matter if they move one week after being hired as opposed to three years?

In short, legislating this type of thing would lead to undesirable emergent behavior caused by the rules of that complex system. It's a good approach if everyone plays fair and works together for mutual benefit, but since when does a company or employee truly care about each other these days?

I have a far simpler solution, the same happen with great success in the past, united people. Witch means:

- a company can perfectly ask for work in the office, even if that job is eligible to be done from remote;

- if there are peoples accepting that, good for them. If not they'll have no choice.

That's a classic and big social issue: people do not know anymore to be social. So you see a certain "unionization push" but at a bureaucratic level, not at mere human level.

If enough IT pro, especially those with a bit of skills, not necessarily genius, gurus etc, decide that ALL WFH-eligible jobs will be accepted only from remote there is no need for a law.

> How does Bob avoid being fired for living somewhere more affordable?

Don't people with kids live in good school districts vs affordability. I know lot of people move out chicago to the burbs for school districts.

Your argument is exactly why WFH will fail.

Bob and Alice share the same manager, Carl. When Carl needs Bob, he has to send a slack message and arrange a time for a call. When Carl needs Alice, he turns his head and calls across the aisle to her desk. How is Bob expected to ever be top of mind or as relevant to Carl as Alice?

Fast forward and anyone with ambition to get ahead will recognize this dynamic and opt to be in the office, and anyone else will WFH and be high on the list to cull when the economy turns. Easier to fire the talking head on your screen than the real person you see every day.

I have worked remotely in IT in multiple positions for over a decade, far pre-dating the pandemic WFH transition.

I have never had a problem with communication or feeling noticed. Everything I do is tracked, and I am at my desk during work hours, the same as if I was in an office.

When someone Slacks me, I generally will get back to them either instantaneously or within a few minutes, the same as if I was in an office.

I'm not sitting around watching Netflix or going for an hour walk at 10 AM. I'm expected during certain hours to be doing my job, no matter where it is.

I don't see this as a reason that "WFh will fail', it's been working fine for me.

With the note that I'm from EU, so some social habits my differ, if someone, not just a manager have to reach me I have a VoIP phone and there is NOTHING to schedule up front. Someone call, I answer.

The "scheduling" part is NOT about WFH vs in office but working without defined timeframes LIKE in the office. If you state: you should be available at your desktop from your home between HH:MM and HH2:MM2 these days per week anything will be the same.

> Bob and Alice share the same manager, Carl. When Carl needs Bob, he has to send a slack message and arrange a time for a call. When Carl needs Alice, he turns his head and calls across the aisle to her desk. How is Bob expected to ever be top of mind or as relevant to Carl as Alice?

Who said you need to arrange a time for a call? Especially if I'm right fucking there.

The availability should be the same. If I am WFH and not at my desk, I'll miss the call. Same thing will happen if I'm in the office and not at my desk.

> How is Bob expected to ever be top of mind or as relevant to Carl as Alice?

Because Bob is a badass who carried an SVP goal by himself and Alice is a typically valueless Amazonian who should now obviously be applauded for being in the office because of reasons.

SO if I live 4 hours away from the office, I don't need to show up at all and still get paid for 8 hours?

No, you have to swipe your timecard at the office when you arrive and then get going on your commute back home.

knowing upper management, theyd be happy with this

Yes. This. :)

I mean, if you go many days without actually producing anything, then presumably you will be let go from the company.

This is already a de facto advantage for people that are closer. Lack of commute often means lack of stress, which leads to more productivity, which leads to promotion.

Clearly none of it is guaranteed, but that general markov chain works surprisingly well. If the company can't pay enough for you to live close, that is already a drain on the company. Whether they realize it or not.

Or in the real world, they could just fire them all in June and thousands of people would send in their resumes so they can have the chance to work at Amazon and commute.

Two years and leave at least they have Amazon on their resume.

This is Amazon and Amazon tier workforce we are talking about. Let’s be real these companies are only as good as their people and Amazon is a pretty toxic place. And people are willing to work there and be toxic to “move up” whatever that means.

I agree with this but I have a feeling the result would be corporate housing and they would require that people either do the commute on their own time or live in corporate housing...very Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk? Nah, it's called the company town and being paid in scrip

As someone who thinks WFH is cancerous, this sounds excellent.

I live about 15 minutes cycle from most jobs in my city. So according to your rule, I can work almost a full 8-hour day, whereas people who prefer to live in the middle of nowhere can only work 4-6 hours.

I wonder who's going to get hired.

> As someone who thinks WFH is cancerous, this sounds excellent.

Found the middle manager who's invested in commercial real estate... B-)

I think WFH is cancerous too, I'm an engineer with no real estate investments.

Allow me to be rude: humans are social animals BUT the way we socialize have evolved all the time. In the present world just phones have deeply changed the socialization and social rules, mobile phones have deeply changed humanity again. WFH is definitively not so new, but it's application at a certain scale is.

Offices are not new, but in the modern sense are a relatively new thing in historic terms. Thinking they are here to stay forever is not different than thinking carriage and horses would be a logistic tool forever, stearic candles a way to light up homes forever etc.

WFH now have some issue, MUCH of them due to the crappy ignorance of most who do not know how an IT infra should be to WFH, so pushing people with crappy collaboration platforms, remote desktop tools etc, but such crappy model will not last more than 5-8 years. People will learn enough. Social structures for easy coordination and communication will show up the few years, as well as the "separation concept" from work cohort and neighbor/friends cohort. Not tomorrow, not so easy, but it will happen as always in history habits have changed following technology and current needs.

Yup. I wrote (in another comment) about the emergent behaviors that would come from that idea, and hiring discrimination is one of them.

At the same time (and I say this not as a point of argument, but as thinking through the thought experiment), I wonder if there should be some sort of legislative action to discourage the societal and environmental burden of these company policies.

For example, I assume that causing numerous people to commute multiple hours each day has some environmental cost. I also assume that there may be some economy of scale that benefits a centralized work force (heating and cooling one building rather than individual homes during the work day). Perhaps the electricity use for computers is better or worse. I don't know.

I'm a libertarian in philosophy, and I ultimately believe that people should be allowed to make their own choices about their own life. I also see the injustice, then, of treating corporations as people, which allows the one person who controls the corporation to have more power and influence than the person who does not own a corporation. It is the essence of "some people are more equal than others" from Animal Farm.

Again, ultimately, it is a thought experiment.

But, I can tell you, that I WFH. Next week, my employer has asked me to come in for a certain meeting, and it is a 2.5 hour commute each way. I get to count the drive as part of my work day. They don't need me to drive in very often. I like this arrangement.

>As someone who thinks WFH is cancerous

A bit provocative, don't you think?

They probably mean there’s little to no cure for it, so wfh is likely to stay.

I think that it's negative to society but that it has enough short-term desire behind it that absence of intervention it'll continue growing.

Virtual interactions will replace physical interactions as time goes on because there are all of the right pressures there.

For example, basically every conference now has the lazy backstop of "just go virtual". Venue fell through? Never mind reducing the size and trying to find somewhere else, just go online because then you can pretend it's not cancelled in all but name.

Cancerous is a pretty accurate term for it, I think. It'll kill what it means to be human. Already has in my career, hence me leaving.

I imagine the 15min commute (by bike! lol) is why you enjoy it. Commute was always my driving force for hating in-office. These days i want land, some chicken, a few goat, etc. By your assertion i would likely have to find a new career, because there's basically no way i can afford 5-10acre and have a sane commute.

But i've been WFH for coming on 10 years now. I don't judge office people, but if i can help it i'm done spending 3h of my day commuting on I5 every time there's a wreck (which happens easily 3 times a week in my area, ugh).