It’s not unusual for companies to limit access to their locations to their employees. Most employees are not free to work anywhere within the company’s buildings. It might seem odd at first because they used to allow you to work in that location, but you have no right to it.
The crux of the question is can they require you to provide your own workspace and must they compensate you for it? That’s been answered ‘no’ and ‘no’ for most US jurisdictions and ‘maybe’ for others.
To add an IMHO: if it is important to you, then you could ask for a reasonable Internet stipend.
Ah, OK, I had been parsing “employment contract” as an adjective-noun phrase, but it sounds like it’s a specific, atomic term of art? That is to say, a salaried employee has a contract, and that contract involves employment, but it’s not an “employment contract”. Is that correct?
Well, when COVID struck and the office were closed, employees were provided with laptops and told to work from home. If they didn’t have internet access they’d have to work something out with their manager, but at the end of the day you need a secure internet connection to work and you can’t come into the office - period, end of story.
Yes, there is a distinction between a contracted employee and an at-will employee. The vast majority Americans employed in private industry are At Will. You are correct that technically there is a contract between an at will employee and their employer in the sense that a meeting of the minds took place and a mutually legally binding agreement was reached. But this is not what is meant by “employee under contract” or “employment contract”.
Contract 101 - a contract not need be written or explicit; it’s essentially an agreement of quid for pro quo. Geneally, if both go along with something, it’s part of the agreement/contract. If two disagree and can’t work out an understanding, then it becomes grounds for courts to look into.
Unless an emplloyee has a written contract - personal one, or through a union - they probably work under an implied contract. From what I’ve read (IANAL) in Canada, the courts consider the power imbalance between employer and employee big enough that the employer owes the employee a “duty of care” to act fairly. This does not necessarily appear to be the case in the USA>
…But to quote Sam Goldwyn’s colourful phraseology “A verbal contract ain’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
My guess is that’s because contracts are fairly common in education - but they really aren’t common overall. When my kids were in a private school, the principal had a contract for a set term ( I think the last was five years) that described her pay, the circumstances under which she could be fired during the contract term, how many PTO days she would have , what health insurance and other benefits she would have an so on. The teachers did not have individual contracts but worked under a union CBA. In either case, the school could not lower their pay or change their benefits or working conditions by fiat. But for most jobs, that sort of contract is not common. A salaried or even hourly employee may have something in writing that describes how many hours per week they will work, their pay , benefits and possibly the job description. That document will also often emphasize that employment is at will, the employee can quit at any time , the company can terminate the employee at any time and for any reason, and that this document is not a contract indicating employment terms or duration. And with that sort of “contract”, it’s almost impossible for the employer to violate it. The only real way they could is to pay you less than agreed for work that you already did - if you agreed to a salary of $2000 per week, they can’t pay you only $1000 for the week ending today. But they can absolutely tell you today that you will be paid $1000/wk starting 8/14. It wouldn’t be a violation for them to tell you on December 24 that Christmas will no longer be a paid holiday or that you will now have to use your five PTO days to cover the company closing the week of Christmas when previously you didn’t have to use PTO, that you will now be paying 25% of the premium for your heath insurance when you used to pay nothing, etc.
I tend to think of that as something of an extreme situation.
I guess I’ve always had philosophical problems with employers changing the playing field like that, especially when it’s intrusive into my not-at-work times and places.
I do remember one point when it was amusingly in my favor though. Sometime around 2008 I got a ruggedized flip phone because I’d killed several phones in the span of about nine months. Well, this phone was ruggedized well beyond anything I’d expected- outside of inexpensive new batteries, the phone was going strong five years later when I finally swapped it out for a smartphone. My employers weren’t sure what to do- they wanted me to install some kind of chat app on my phone (my personal phone!) and I’d just wave the flip phone at them and say I couldn’t. I actually held on to that flip phone until I changed jobs to expressly avoid that stupid app.
I don’t think an employer could have compelled me to personally buy a smartphone, but they could have issued me one of their own if they wanted me to have one that badly.
Are you an employee or are you self-employed? Because only employees lost the ability to deduct unreimbursed expenses and home office costs in 2018 - the self-employed can still deduct them.
Instructions for the 2022 Form 2106 say it is only for use by Armed
Forces reservists, qualified performing artists, fee-basis state or
local government officials, or employees with impairment-related
work expenses.
Which kind of makes sense. You cannot deduct travel expenses for daily commuting to a job site if it’s your regular work as an employee, nor can you deduct you Armani suits because it’s formal office attire at work. SO you can’t claim the home computer is a business expense - if it was necessary, the company would have paid for it. Presumably similar logic applies at home. Your pay implicitly or specifically reimburses you for such expenses.
I note an interesting court case I read about in a employment rights column - where a rabbi was dismissed after 20 years the the same synagog. (Appears to have been factional fighting within the board) The board tried to claim he’d been on a 1 year contract, as they’d renewed his contract each year. The court said no, someone who’d been an employee for 20 years was an employee for 20 years, and they couldn’t hide behind the fiction of a 1-year contract. In Canada, letting a 20-year professional employee go can cost the employer well over a year’s salary.
Ref your first paragraph, actually there was no such logic.
Employees used to be able to deduct business expenses for many things. Uniforms, but not business attire. Commuting expenses, but only between work locations, not to/from home. Publications related to your industry. In the early days of home computers and home offices employees could deduct lots of those expenses as long as their employer derived benefit from them. A salaried worker doing work email in the evenings from home was exactly the kind of thing that made your computer deductible. etc.
And yes, as automation, smart phones, high speed internet, and all the rest infiltrated everyone’s lives, it was an area rife with exaggerated deductions. But that’s not why the law was changed to eliminate employee business deductions.
When the trump tax changes were made in 2019 the goal was simple: give Joe-Sixpack a few hundred bucks a year in benefits, give Joe MegaBux a huge tax cut, and make sure the Fed’s books still balanced by sticking it to the Mortgage+Mercedes set. IOW me and people like me. My taxes went up, not down, when trump’s changes came in. The bit about armed forces reservists still being eligible was simple vote-buying among the crew-cut set.
[Moderating]
The fact that such things used to be tax-deductible is, I think, relevant to this thread, but the political reasons why that tax status changed are getting far afield from the scope of FQ. Let’s drop that part of it now.
I see a more logical approach - if the employer says “you need to buy uniform” and does not reimburse you, then it is a job expense. “I think I’ll get a computer and do email from home” is logically not a necessary expense unless the employer mandates it, like the uniform. There are other expenses related to a work or profession - union dues, professional association dues, those publications (equivalent of ongoing education necessary for a up-to-date professional) etc. Your car is a business expense if it is needed for travel other than daily commute to your regular workplace. (Then you have to track how much is business related travel vs. personal, etc.) The problem with a computer is it has significant non-work applications and tracking work-vs-nonwork is a little difficult.
Not sure how much that has changed with recent on-going tax changes in the USA.
Twenty years ago it would have been a different story. You could have definitely claimed that a computer in the home was a work only expense or even now if you have a lap top that is only used for work and a separate one for personal use.
It’s been a while since I looked at this but if you used the computer at home half for work and half for personal use, couldn’t you write off half of the value?
It looks like my tax prep software asks me about work-related expenses, but then doesn’t actually include them on the return. So I haven’t been claiming it like I thought.
It seems to me it’s like claiming your personal car. For the car, you had to keep a travel log of trips: distance, purpose, destination, etc. - just to show it was actually X% work. How would you quantify computer use? Keep a log? It’s one thing for a car that runs into the tens of thousands - Revenue Canada, for example, even publishes a standard number of cents per mile you claim. Computers are so cheap nowadays, what’s the point. A $600 computer amortized over what, 3 years or more? At a certain point, materiality is an issue. Again, you’d have to show the employer required it but didn’t pay for it. $200 a year, for a refund of what? $50? Is it worth it to keep a log for that? And if it’s used 50% of the time for work, we’re talking $25?
The same logic would apply to internet service. Or a phone landline. (or cellphone). The effort to simply log things would be onerous. No wonder the tax department doesn’t want to be nickel-and-dimed with this stuff. At least a portion of a house is a big enough expense to justify claiming it.