I’m curious why he should be asked to take a pay cut. He’s doing the same amount of work. His expenses shouldn’t matter. If he lived across the street from the office or 4 hours away is his choice. If he lived across the street from the office but still didn’t want to go in, he wouldn’t be saving money but would still be asked to take a pay cut?
A bit of one yes, but I live in a low cost of living city (I’m not living in SF or some other city with high wages and high property values). However I have been thinking of buying a condo, and condos near work are 50% more expensive per sq ft than ones on the other side of town.
I agree about the commute. I’ve heard many other people mention how their commute has gotten to be much easier with so many of us working from home. Fewer car accidents, lower carbon footprint, easier commute for people who do commute, etc. Plus companies can spend less on office real estate.
Its win win for everyone basically. The only people who lose are inept managers trying to justify their own jobs, and the people who own restaurants near workplaces that’ll see fewer customers.
I didn’t say he should be asked to take a pay cut. I asked if he would be willing to take one. Those are two completely different things.
The bad news this will force businesses to double their investment in setting up automated shops. I can see a time in the not-too-distant future when a McDonald’s is probably staffed by a person or two who just comes in to make sure the computers and kiosks work, and to fix them if they don’t. Maybe there’s a shift manager or security guard on duty to calm down pissed off customers.
OK, why should he be willing to take a pay cut? He’s doing the same amount of work.
Would you be willing to give more of your profits or pay higher taxes for people to stay at home and make the traffic better for you? Then those people who are willing to take a pay cut can be given that money.
Nice thing about not having to commute is that you can choose where you live on other factors other than how close it is to your job.
Eh, office managers as well. When I did catering, I really liked some of those that I interacted with. While the inept managers that justify their jobs by looking over your shoulder while you work are no big loss, I think that office manager no longer being a viable profession is a bit of a loss.
Maybe, but they may be able to make up for it with deliveries. And it’s not like those offices will stay closed. There are jobs that require you to be on site, and those jobs will fill in those offices while those of you who don’t need to be there will stay home.
Still don’t understand the purpose of your question here. He said he was willing to change jobs if it meant being able to continue working from home. I was just curious to see if being able to work from home would give benefits that would compensate for a reduced financial compensation.
Well, yeah, actually. I support things like a UBI and until such a thing exists, unemployment and extended unemployment benefits, and I do pay quite a bit in taxes.
That makes no sense whatsoever. I’m not entirely sure where you are going with this line, but I think this is where I get off.
In all fairness, in my experience it’s not so much an issue that they “aren’t working”. It’s that their work requires coordination of complex tasks across various team members, stakeholders and so on. In fact. I think one of the reasons for the complaints of Zoom / remote burnout is not that managers don’t think their people are working. It’s that they have no visibility into how hard they are working or what they are working on.
Also, I don’t care what anyone says. Complex projects that require a lot of collaboration and decision-making are much easier when everyone is co-located. Sure, you can use Zoom and Google Docs or other collaborative tools, but it takes five times as long. In my pre-covid job I mostly worked remotely as well. But I also managed to resolve a lot of problems by driving out to a client site, seeing first hand what was actually going on, and then steering the team in the right direction before things got out of control.
I don’t want to be chained to an office 40+ hours a week, but I also enjoy the camaraderie of making small-talk and going out to lunch with my coworkers. Maybe even grabbing a beer after work. I don’t really like this new world of logging in, dealing with email, Zoom, Slack, and updating Google Docs/Sheets/Slides all day until I’m comfortable that the noise level is low enough that it’s ok to sign off for the night.
Some businesses, namely those currently paying employees to live in a high cost of living location, won’t be able to continue to pay those same high wages if their employees are all remote and they’re competing with other remote companies.
My own company is in DC and was paying DC wages up until about 2 years ago, when they started hiring remote employees from middle America for 2/3 the cost. Now that the entire DC office is remote, they’re effectively paying those folks 50% more than the middle-Americans for doing the same work. Without an office to go to, it’d be easy for them to come down and say, “we need to cut salaries to stay competitive, you can take the pay cut and move to a different city, or quit.” I don’t see them doing this because of the ill-will it would garner, but it also doesn’t seem fair that an engineer working from home in DC is getting paid more than her coworker working from home in Wichita Falls.
I think that there are some jobs where such interaction is useful, and some where it isn’t. Until recently, both were stuck going in to the office, whether or not it made sense.
Now that we are starting to unwind stay at home orders, the jobs that make sense to go back to the office can go back to the office, and the jobs that make sense to stay home can stay home.
Well, to some degree we’re already there. Every time you order fast food through the app, you didn’t interact with someone behind the register. Sheetz has been using a touchscreen ordering system to the cooks in their stores for twenty years now. Automated ordering is going to happen a lot sooner than automated production, in part because the robots have no flexibility to deal with issues.
Flip this around. I should be paid more for working at home.
My bosses save money on office rent, electrical bills, internet access, cleaning, office furniture, air conditioning, heating, you name it.
Or we could accept that it’s a wash, and just keep the pay we currently have? We both benefit, why try to turn a win-win into something lesser?
Yeah, this. There’s still going to be people in the mix. I’d rather replace two or three crappy low-paying jobs with one decent paying job.
And that technology has been there for quite a while. When the register operator put your order in, they didn’t interact with the sandwich maker or grill operator.
Kiosks and self ordering are certainly the low hanging fruit, as all that it really requires is turning the register around so that the customer is pushing the same buttons that the reg op used to. Of course, the user interface is made a bit more user friendly, but that’s about it.
Automating sandwich production is doable, but certainly much harder.
Or you both save on costs, and pass that savings onto your customers.
Do you really believe that most businesses would do that? If the last two decades should have taught us anything, it’s that when rich people get their hands on extra money, they keep it, whenever possible.
Here’s the thing, or things…
First, this is most likely a temporary aberration in the labor market caused by the effects of the stimulus payments. Right now, it’s not worth people’s time or effort to go work some crap fast food or other low-wage job because they have an alternate supplemental income that may be making other work like gig work or their first job (assuming they work two jobs) sufficient to meet their needs.
Second, it’s always baffling to me to hear these articles making it sound like these jerkish workers are doing something wrong here. They don’t owe the low-wage employers anything- they are paid by the hour for work they’ve already done. If they choose to not work, then that’s their choice. The employers also have a choice at that point- put up with fewer people or lower quality people than they would prefer, or pay more such that higher quality employees are attracted to those jobs, and the ones who are already there want to stay. It’s literally as easy as that.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling that once the pandemic is sufficiently cooled down and the stimulus payments stop, we’ll see a reversal of this phenomenon, in the sense of we didn’t see it prior to the pandemic and the stimulus checks, and it’s unlikely that we’ll see it afterward.
In a larger sense, it’s a reflection of there basically being too many people and not enough jobs for the labor market to provide high wages for everyone. That’s part of the reason that economic growth is so important - without growth, we still have population growth, but the pool of potential jobs doesn’t grow, meaning that wages fall, consumer spending falls, etc…
As for professional workers and the work-from-home stuff, I’m not sure how that’ll play out. I know where I work, there’s a lot of expectation of more generous policies post-pandemic, but nobody knows what form those will take yet.
It only takes one business to do that.
Then you lose all your customers unless you follow suit.
And that is true, which is why you will never see an increase in pay for working from home, even if it does save your boss money.
Fine, then let them go first. I’ll believe it when I see it.
‘Business are the drivers of the American Innovation Economy.’
‘Well, they need innovate their outdated business models to pay more than $8/hour.’
‘Wait. Not like that.’