An hour spent commuting is 1/16th of your daily life, and that hour is by far the biggest risk to your life every day. You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.
Less congestion for people that do need to travel.
Less pollution.
More free time.
Cheaper housing because we won’t all need to be clustered in the places with decent paying jobs.
But no, fuck it all because the mega rich might have to make do with very slightly less.
If you do the math, its just horrible. If you have one hour to work, its 2 hours every day just getting to and back from work, which is 10 hours per week.
So you are spending more than an entire work day every week in traffic! Every year, you are spending 41 full working days in traffic!!
Isnt that just insane? If you are working from home, you have 10 hours of free time every week. The value of that is insane. You could go to gym, spend time with family, learn how to cook, whatever. Its a lot of time.
On a related note, you should get off big tech social media because that will suck up so much time you could use to improve yourself instead.
Small tech social media is just as bad at sucking all that time up. Ask me how I know :(
At least it’s your own brain exploiting you instead of some shadowy cabal of advertising execs and astroturf campaign strategists?
Yeah in most cases if a job gave you a 25% increase for always in office and you are wfh you would be better off staying work from home unless your wage was inadequate to begin with (which unfortunately it often is).
You would need more, because also paying for fuel or public transport, expensive lunch, maybe coffee…in my case I spent hundreds of dollars every month just from office related costs.
Its scary how bad it is for us to go to an office. Sure, if you single and you need coworkers to not feel lonely, it may be worth it. But im super happy not going.
yeah 25% the equation still leans wfh (ie from above: you would be better off staying work from home) but somewhere over that it becomes a fair trade off if you like money.
I have always felt that you should be paid for travel time for a job. If it takes 30 mins to drive to work then the company should be paying you that time.
Look at how many bosses/CEOs bill their daily travel expenses to the company
Which CEO downvoted this?
I wonder if this would make it harder for people to find jobs. I imagine companies would be less inclined to hire people an hour away if they had to pay for it.
Or they might allow more work from home if it means saving on those commutes.
Also I have seen many office location decisions seem to be about the ceo’s commute.
That would be good except that you could literally get a job far away for “was” money, or you would disadvantage people living farther away from jobs (cities)
There are people who take Work from Home jobs in high CoL areas and then move to low CoL places to pocket the difference, so that’s not too far off from what already happens.
Plus, on the other side, incentivizing companies to hire locally could cause companies to be selective in their location to maximize the convenience of commuting from multiple areas for reduced overhead, or increase the desire for increased urban density and lessen suburban sprawl, which is literally choking the life out of places in infrastructure costs alone. Garbage and water services for the wealthy suburbs is subsidized from the taxes of poor people’s apartment buildings.
Of course, we all know that what would really happen is that we’d see the return of company towns where you sleep in the same bed as 2 other guys on 8 hour shifts so the bed has 100% occupancy 24 hours a day.
it’s unpaid labor either way, it’s a bit arbitrary to say owning a car and commuting for a job isn’t time and money spent for the employer in your capacity as an employee
Historically unpaid commute originated before urban sprawl, car culture and a massive spike in population, it’s been grandfathered in, but it’s absolutely theft in the current environment, whether the job can be done at home or not. Posit 1 hr commute either way, that’s 10hrs a week, and should probably get hazard loading as well. When unpaid commute originated it was more like 10-15 minutes walk per day.
One of the most significant and efficient policy changes to combat CO2 and other pollutants would be to legislate paid commuting (with just protection against discrimination for both employee and employer). Just watch every employer WFH everyone who can doing the obvious, not to mention improved quality of life, local services and being hugely popular. Expect one hell of a fight.
I would like to add a rider to pay at least minimum wage for interview time.
You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.
That’s something a union can help with. Most compensation above poverty wages has been won by unions at one point or another. Most of them a long ago and we’ve been regressing for a few decades.
There is a study that showed workers don’t mind commuting so long as the route is full of greenery and nature. That explains a lot because in my hometown, I was happy enough to commute in public transport and people are nice enough that you can chat with them. Then I moved to a bigger city, which is a concrete jungle. I hate the commute. And mind you, the public transport in my home town is about ten to twenty minutes more depending on the traffic, but I didn’t mind for some reason. Then, after moving to a bigger city, travelling only for one hour feels like a long trek.
Something like 4 minutes of my 25 minute commute is through trees, and it still makes a big difference. I think you’re on to something.
I used to have a drive to work, and it suckkkkkkkkkked. I moved, and can now cycle to work or take a nice train. I suddenly do not mind my 30 minute commute at all. I look forward to my bike ride most of the time, and I love the feeling after having done it.
I take a bus and then walk … half hour or so on the bus and half hour or so of walking. If I drive it’s like 35-45 minutes?
However, I’m always more tired when I arrive there. Also, I’m not a fan of finding parking and stuff around the office.
Oh my yes. My big nastalgia thing is when I lived in a neighborhood just outside city center and my commute was three miles. I would walk it, go four miles out of my way to bike the lakefront, or if weather was bad enough take transit. Most of the time I was getting nice exercise with the commute and I could pick up some things on my way home. I mean a lot of that is just not being in a car really and of course that outside of work most everything I needed day to day was walkable.
Yeah honestly I don’t get the hate, maybe this is why.
I could never live in the city. That place is dark, full of tall buildings that block out the sky and covered in trash over concrete that blocks out the ground.
Out here in the country I have a ten minute commute and would go insane if I had to work from home. I’m quite happy to go to the office five days a week.
I think cities are the problem, not commuting.
On top of my suspicion that your mental image of “cities” is just downtown Manhattan, which not all cities and certainly not all parts of any city are like, the fact that you mentioned having a 10 minute commute says to me that you definitely don’t live in a rural location. Simply living in a suburb does not mean you are living in the country, and there has been research done that people are much more likely to think they live in a rural location when they very much don’t if they live in a suburb of a much more dense city.
Suburbs is actually which I hate the worst but ironically live in. It lacks the convenience of the city with no real significant increase in nature. It just has more lawns over the city and lacks a lot of plant diversity as the city is more likely to throw some trees and bushes and various greenery in the public space or require buildings to have it over the burbs which is just house and lawns. Problem is the burbs are a bit cheaper mostly and have some public transit that connects up with the city system.
I don’t think many people would complain about a 10 minute commute. My mom has a 45 minute drive to and from work each day, and works 10 hour days (4 days a week). I would go insane.
Absolutely. I’ve been working from home for ~3 years and I’ll never go back. I have so much more time for myself (and also, no one is annoying me with smalltalk or stupid questions).
Not to mention the environmental damage.
Agreed.
I’m lucky in several respects, being on a public transit line and only 10 minutes from work, but we have a guy on my team who drives, in his own car, 90 miles each way for our one day a week in the office. It’s dumb.
Accepting an onsite job, regardless of whether it can be performed at home or not, places the responsibility on you to be able to commute there, and it wouldn’t be fair to compensate only office workers for their commute time when other workers face the same risks while traveling. I’d rather have reliable public transportation and fair salaries relative to costs of living.
This fails to take into account unemployment rates or any other factors that apply pressure to such decision-making. We need legislation that enshrines payment for commute time universally, as it would encourage WFH mandates rather than RTO ones. As well as compensate other workers for their commute. Or perhaps a flat rate of one hour each way’s pay no matter the distance, to stop certain workers finding it harder to get a job.
My employer gives everyone an annual public transport ticket for commuting.
Taking into account expenses, and no need to financially budget for travel and stress about it, this is a fairly low cost way to satisfy your employees. Is the work not possibly WFH or employer would rather have people in office?
It’s in Germany, people are really weird about WFH. Most people were forced back into the office, even software developers.
Can you use that for non-work travel too?
Yes. The ticket is valid on most public transport at all times.
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I currently travel 2 hours to and from work, making my 9 to 5 a 7 to 7. I hate it so much lmao
I mean… It can be. You just have to ask for a raise. That is what I do. If I get a job that is further away, I expect to be paid more. One of the reasons I’m sticking with my current job even though the pay is not great, is that I’m less than 10 minutes away from home. I even get to come home for lunch.
Upvoting, but also commenting to say that employees are at a disadvantage in almost all cases: a company can almost certainly absorb your loss but most people cannot absorb the loss of their income.
Asking for a raise could get you fired (sorry, “let go”), especially if you’re in a position where there’s an eager new applicant just waiting for a position to open up, such as any service-industry job.
Even niche skilled jobs are not immune. If your cost approaches the value your employer extracts from your labor, then you will be left jobless and you may find it hard to find a comparable position if your skill-set is tightly focused. If you’re the one COBOL programmer at your company, you are underpaid; the moment you demand your actual worth, they will figure out how to pivot that old code-base to something more modern, even if it costs millions of dollars to license and switch to a new ERP platform or similar bullshit.
I’ve turned this WFH rant into a worker protection rant, so back on topic: Wouldn’t it be nice to just … not have to drive to a place to put your butt in a seat when your butt could be at a seat at home and do the exact same thing? I get that some jobs don’t work that way, but many (probably most) do.
In 2020, we witnessed most jobs at company headquarters around the world being done at home and nothing exploded. Almost everything done from a cubicle can be done from home. Wouldn’t it be nice to knock down those buildings and make them green spaces instead?
When I was renting (most of my life), I would find an apartment that was close to my job. I hated commuting with a furious passion.
I’ve done 30000km in a year by commuting.
In one single year, I commuted about 50000 km in my own car before I could move closer to my workplace. People have a hard time believing me until I point it out on a map.
