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Comment by phowat | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully, because I wouldn't want to be discriminated against if I chose to live further away from work so I could afford a nicer, bigger place.

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The ruling only applies to workers who are being sent to appointments, rather than working from a fixed office. E.g. sales reps, care workers. From the article:

"Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled."

This seems fair to me. I know people who are regularly leaving home at 5am to make their first appointment at 9am just so their employer can avoid paying them overtime.

Fun fact: In Japan most companies will pay for your public transport ticket.

Never heard any suggestion of discrimination based on this though.

Although time cost > public transport cost.

Here in Brazil it's the same and I've heard plenty of stories of companies who wouldn't hire people if they cost more than X per day in transportation. Not for tech workers, but for unskilled jobs.

Same here in the Netherlands. For skilled labor it's generally a non-issue, for unskilled labor they'll often require you to live near or own a transport card already.

The incentive to discriminate would be pretty high if employers were forced to pay per hour of missed work. Man hours are more expensive than travel costs

I’ve only seen this for students of universities and all kinds of schools here in Europe.

Although school students only get a ticket for their way from school to home, and university students get a ticket that allows them to get anywhere in their region for free.

The same type of arrangement is also common in North America, though many students who live off-campus, or in suburbs resent having to subsidize the city dwellers (as the programs are usually mandatory).

Well, this is Europe – so, at least in Germany, 95% live off-campus, and many in suburbs. But due to being Europe, busses every 15min are usual even in the farthest suburbs.

I have been told I live too far way when applying for a job in Tokyo. I don't think that had anything to do with the cost of transportation (which would probably have been under $100 a month). I can think of plenty of other reasons. I can imagine assuming the long commute will affect job perf. I can imagine assuming someone with a long commute more likely to seek other employment. I can imagine someone with a long commute needing to leave the office earlier. I'm not saying those are true only guessing at reasons it came up.

On the opposite side I once hired someone in So Cal that had a long commute. Alhambra to Newport Beach. He lasted 2 weeks before he put in his notice because the commute was too long.

They absolutely do. And they always ask you where do you live when you are applying for a job.

Obviously, this is not the most important point to decide whether they hire you or not, but the price of the commuting fee can make them choose between two similar candidates. Specially for low paying jobs.

Fun fact: In Japan most companies will pay for your public transport ticket.

This is primarily a tax optimization, FWIW. If I pay you 10万 in cash, I owe the government ~１万 and you owe the government maybe 3万 or so (depends heavily on bracket). If I pay you 10万 for your train ticket, neither of use owes the government additional taxes.

Thus, if we come to the agreement that your labor is worth 35万 a month to the company, it is in our mutual interest to characterize that as 25万 of salary and 10万 of "reasonable travel expenses."

There exists a spectrum of how aggressive companies are on this one. Some play things very safe and use the actual cost of the shortest public transportation between your house and the office, going to elaborate lengths to calculate that. Some say "We assume, unless you tell us differently, that transportation costs you more than 10万 a month, and will accordingly compensate you for the first 10万 of it." (The reimbursement is only non-taxable up to １０万.)

(Edit to add: １万円 = 10k yen = ~ $100. Much like our Indian friends count things in lahks and crores, Japanese breaks numbers lower than a hundred million into a count of 10^4 rather than a count of 10^3.)

This is also why we get 600 RMB every month on a card in China for lunch. So Microsoft does offer free lunches to some employees, just not in the states.

The 万 is used in China as well, confusing as heck when talking about home prices.

Funny how using 円 for both Yen and Yuan carried over to the dollar-style currency symbol, ¥, which is also shared.

I rarely see the yen symbol used, I don't even know how to type it, instead we have 人民币, 块, 元。

Oh, I know it's not used in actual Chinese or Japanese text. It's more used in other languages in place of the hanzi/kanji.

Same for the Netherlands, a lot of employers reimburse the public transport subscription costs or pay an amount depending on km distance between work and home. That's wherever you live, even if you are more than an hour train ride away.

French companies are required to pay 50% of your monthly transport ticket (which you can then also use on week-ends and evenings, so it pays for a bit more than 50% of your commuting costs in the end).

What a bizarrely unfair tax. Why not just drop the cost of (public) transport 50% ?

(1) not all transport is public (2) you'd have to make up for income losses for public transport companies with increased taxes, but now instead of driving income for public transport companies through market demand you're creating subsidies, which creates an organisational culture that's not consumer-oriented but rather oriented towards the government that subsidises it.

Anyway there are pros and cons, these are just the cons. If you ask me public transport would be a big source of investments and a completely free service like say the justice system, public roads, parks etc. Moving about the city in the safest, most efficient, cheapest, cleanest and environmentally friendly manner that's mass transit (i.e. ignoring say bicycles) should be free if you ask me.

Why not socialise public transport and replace the fees with tax-based funding altogether?

Sorry, that's my inner socialist leaking.

How would you allocate the money between mass transit (RATP), long-range transit (SNCF), bike rentals (Vélib) and electric car rentals (Autolib) ? And this is for Paris alone.

For operating costs, usage seems the obvious way.

Now that smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, I suspect it could even be done statistically. Create a good transit app with embedded tracking. You'd know where people were trying to go to, how they ended up getting there, how long it took, etc.

Do that and you could eliminate all of the overhead of ticketing, charging, etc. It wouldn't be perfectly accurate, but it's not like the current system is either. [1]

[1] http://www.dw.com/en/jumping-the-barriers-on-the-paris-metro...

> Create a good transit app with embedded tracking

if this would have to be mandatory it wouldn't catch on with anyone remotely concerned about privacy.

A group which, on present evidence, is about 0.1% of the population, which would not be a big problem for the scheme. But there's no reason to make it mandatory in that the goal is to make transit free and allocate money statistically. No harm would be done by putting some obscure checkboxes deep in the settings.

Funny how the first idea in your head involves surveillance and the first idea in mine is socialising infrastructure (i.e. everybody pays).

You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?

It makes sense though, in societies where you don't or can't live where you work. Why would you want to work for an employer when part of your money goes to getting to work? On the other side of the coin, if an employer can get good people from all around by just paying for the commute, that's only going to be good for them. Plus there's tax benefits; if you have 200 / month in travel expenses, either the boss pays it, or pays you an extra 400 (which comes down to 200 with imaginary taxes)

My GF had a job in the next city, thanks to roadworks and the like a 1.5 - 2 hour commute, unpaid; she worked 40 hours a week, plus 15-20 hours for commuting. IIRC a third of her crappy wage was spent on even getting to and from work, let alone the time. She's now self-employed in her own town, works 20ish hours a week, and makes about the same or a bit more.

Commuting is not something one does with pleasure, generally speaking.

There's something like that in most of europe and it's a tax thing, the company pays less taxes on that kind of comp rather than straight money. That's why in some countries almost every company will provide a company car: leasing cars and using that as comp' costs the company less than giving their employees the same comp' in straight cash.

On the other hand, there are many minimum wage jobs, at least in the U.S., where living close to work is completely out of the question financially. So there's an implicit 2+ hour unpaid daily commute required to have that job.

I'm not sure how to give affluent people the freedom to exchange commute times for lifestyle choices without forcing the same lifestyle choices on the less privileged.

At the cost of higher travel expenses to anywhere, though. I've been looking into the housing market lately; right now I live in a rental house close to a train station, my commute is about an hour. For the same price I can get a nice three bedroom house in a town somewhere, but it would be further away from anything - ergo, more travel expenses.

Its only for Blue collar hourly paid employees like Telecoms Engineers (Linemen).

M&P Salaried staff will be unaffected.

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