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Working From Home: Bougie Kings, or Middle Class Normalcy, We Report You decide
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Nah I do a thing it has a value, what I do with that money afterwards, such as where I spend it for shelter is none of your business.
In the same way people are saying that a boss asking them to come into the office is grounds for looking for other work... being in an environment where you cannot go to HR because someone is actually spewing nazi shit (not difference of opinion, mind you - you have to be able to roll with that - but actual pray away the gay, shithole countries nazi shit) - I would find another job. Being remote doesn't mean removing all interactions with these folks.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Kind of is the company's business; for one, you have to file taxes where you work and where you live. They do too. Many businesses get tax incentives for hiring people in the city/county/state, and that may have factored in to why they hired you and what salary they are going to offer.
Like, the are not going to pay a manhattan salary to a minnesota worker because it doesn't make sense to.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Sure it does, cause you’d be willing to pay Manhattan prices for the thing you need from them. If you’d be willing to pay a worker in Manhattan for that work and have the money to dedicate to it then that’s the value of that work. You’re short changing the other worker because you think less of them because of where they live. The thing they are providing doesn’t lose value based on where they live. You just get to decide they are worth less.
It’s straight up worker abuse on whim that you get to make the decision to do. Judging them to be a less valuable asset merely because of where their feet are trapped.
oh my god this
Today is my WFH day and I needed to go edit a whole bunch of group policies, while interacting with another person, and in the office I know he would have walked over to my cubicle and tried to talk to me about requirements while I worked and it would have taken 6 times as long because it's hard for me to keep everything someone has verbally told me in my head as opposed to just, putting their teams message on my second monitor that has a whole ass writeup of what they want, with the work on the other monitor
If a company hires me at X salary and doesn't specify that I have to be in location Y to do my job, and I then move to bumfuck nowhere to really make the most of the salary, that's entirely fair. Likewise if you're willing to pay someone X salary to do a job, and they can do it remote, then X shouldn't decrease because the location only had one Tim Hortons for the entire town.
The company I work for have had conniptions about this because people have just moved to more rural parts of the province, as opposed to staying here in the city, and my thinking here is If the company doesn't like it, they can write their employment contract more carefully in the future.
Or more succinctly, fuck the company.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age [Switch] - Sit down and watch our game play itself
Why, exactly, "doesn't it make sense" - especially if they're doing the same work? Sleep's whole point is that the argument that there should be pay differentials is built on some rather questionable priors.
This is the company perspective. It's why call centers or operational centers are in bumfuck parts of the country - the labor is less costly. If you're going remote first you find a solid salary point that will provide for cost of living in most places then hire at that. You won't get Manhattanites, but you don't have to pay them that either. Unless your work is tied to a specific location (like where exchanges are, or where key business partners are that like to meet in person), there's no reason for it. Let the worker decide what their cost of living/locale/salary balance is as opposed to declaring specific schedules. It also eliminates ANOTHER layer of expense as you no longer need to constantly study the markets and approve outsize promotions because your COL schedules don't quite keep up with hyperlocal trends in parts of those areas.
There's nothing magic about any of these places, and while they have higher concentrations of specific types of worker (NY for fashion, finance, SF for tech, LA for production, Detroit for auto stuff), most companies don't actually need the magical unicorn workers. Not to mention - lots of those magical unicorn workers don't actually want to live there.
When general remote stuff was allowed during/immediately post pandemic, TONS of our top performers moved to where they wanted to live and continued to do their job remotely as they could get the life they wanted and enable a spouse to stay home or be closer to family or key hobbies. As a company, that's great as honestly now the employee cares less about outsize comp as they aren't playing the "hit the number" game.
I'm generally of the opinion that there should be a base value for a unit of work for each job/etc, and employees who are required to live/work in higher COL places for work reasons should get an adjustment, but a lot of people have become effectively stuck to higher COL areas due to where they were working pre-pandemic and have not had the ability/wherewithall to move. I don't think companies should have to subsidize people's living choices anymore than people should have to live crappy places for a job, but I don't know what the best middle ground is. I think though that ignoring the realities in play is dangerous and privileged. There is societal level benefit from not having all the high end tech earners lock themselves away on compounds in Montana where they can own 1000 acres for the price of that Seattle studio but again, I don't have a great solution that isn't inherently massively unfair to SOMEONE.
You definitely should always feel like if you're actually sick you shouldn't be obligated to work, and can rest and recover.
But there are plenty of times when I'm WfH where I'll work part or all of the day, but if I had to go into the office I probably would have called off. Something like coming down with a cold but not really at the 'sick' point, but I also wouldn't want to be in the office getting other people sick. Or maybe some tummy trubs in the morning where I wouldn't want to be uncomfortable or having to run from my cube to the shitter in the office, but being a few steps from my own home bathroom is fine.
It's not as big a deal with me having a separate sick and vacation bank (and never coming close to using my whole sick bank), but for someone on PTO who is 'fine' to work being able to work a half or whole day (or maybe lay down and rest for an hour or so if they have a headache or something going on) instead of burning a whole day is good for both the employee and the company.
Just think of it like your salary is a combination of different factors Skills Required for Job + Cost of Living + Hardship, etc. Some of these go up/down depending on where you are in the world.
Because they don't have to. Someone in Minnesota will be willing to accept lower pay because their expenses are lower.
(Laughs in Montana home owner)
Oh, you sweet summer child - you'd be surprised how expensive it gets out here.
Edit: Not to mention that places like Bozeman are seeing prices skyrocket as people from the West Coast have relocated. There's a reason I cried when I saw my home assessment earlier this year.
So is your argument that cost of living is not actually different or that cost of living should not affect salary amounts? Because those are two different arguments.
It's a great way to get your annual compliance tests done!
Both, because COL is growing more normalized and in the end the company is paying for the employee's experience and knowledge.
But in a profit seeking venture you can measure how much value an employee should bring to the team. Whatever widget they will be working on or tasks they will complete brings in a value to the company. What we’re quibbling over is how much of a cut of that value add the company gets to take. I don’t think “Well you live in the middle of nowhere, so I should get a bigger cut” is a super solid argument,
However that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about, “houses cost less where you live, so we’re just gonna extract some more wealth from this employment agreement”.
Which is all well and good until you're a person doing something that can't be work from home in that area and now your COL is tripled over the course of two years because every house on your block was bought up by someone from the west coast and now your landlord is selling the house you've lived in for the past five years.
All of a sudden the Cuban restaraunt closed because the immigrants running it got evicted too. Now it's replaced by a restaraunt group out of NYC.
then before you know it, you're priced out of the walkable city you've lived in for the past 8 years, you go from doing ok to living from paycheck to paycheck, and all the beautiful charming touches have become displaced by capital from WFH jobs from high COL places.
Okay well I have no interest in debating the former, if it is happening than salaries will come to reflect it. For the latter, the company is idealing paying only as much as they need to for the employee's experience and knowledge. If you can find someone out in the sticks and offer them 150% of their current salary but that is half what you would need to offer someone local, that makes sense.
Likewise it makes sense for the worker to extract maximum value from the company.
That's subversive talk!
Sure but you're already being offered a lot more than you would be making otherwise so you probably won't just not accept anything less than 1 cent less than the local salary would be.
The massive increase in housing costs in the past decade isn't due to high CoL folks moving to low CoL locations due to WFH, it's because we've had a shortage in home building since 2008, and demand has vastly outstripped supply.
FRED for San Francisco:
Texas:
Minnesota:
I also get it, as between when we bought our place in 2014 and today, prices have effectively doubled in our town. We also just did a survey and roughly 75% of people that responded engage in some level of working from home. I can't blame them, it's an awesome location with easy access to lots of different things while keeping the woods and nature at your doorstep. As I'm on town boards, now we have to figure out how to make things at least somewhat sustainable for folks like town workers, as it's not like a teacher can afford to live here right now.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics seems to disagree with this assesment.
I'm not alone in this, the same thing happened to Juggernut in South Carolina and there were even people talking about moving from NYC to Charolette because 100k in Charolette buys a lot and 8 acres whereas in NYC it might buy an apartment.
if it was just because of a shortage of supply (Which is part of the problem) then why the timing?
I also feel that there is going to be great changes required by the freedom it offers, and we should be concerned with a lot of people who are being impacted by it.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Right further, which in a way makes it faster because previously they'd get to these regions eventually with how white flight works, but now they don't have to wait for like an office relocation to a remote area.
It absolutely sucks to a place getting gentrified, I live in an area that's having that happen (my condo was worth 180k, new condos being built start at the 800k range for a similar size. And what will happen is I sell and leave because I can't afford here I move to a cheaper place and force them out of where they live.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I think there's a major difference between people moving farther and farther out from whatever urban core or office park place where they work and WFH decouples people from the office so now they're able to move to places that wouldn't have ever been an option and drive up demand there. Plus, didn't all the white pretty much already flight at least three or more decades ago?
And WFH driving up prices nationwide makes sense. Housing prices are very sticky, and people are leaving places where the demand for housing is off the charts; so you're going to have prices going up where the WFHers are going with not nearly as much decrease (if any) in prices where they're leaving.