If commute time was paid you'd be incentivizing people to live further from work.
The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.
The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.
I suspect if commute time was indistinguishable from work time as far as pay goes, employers would still want to encourage employees to live closer to work in various ways.
That had a direct impact on at least one person I know's decision to move further from the office.
Look at it in another way -- you're basically penalizing the employees that don't spend time commuting by paying them less money. In practice I've seen this kind of phenomenon with smoking. Many years ago, in the army, the smokers got smoking breaks whereas the non-smokers did not. Soon almost all soldiers were smokers!