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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I disagree strongly with this statement in the article:

"There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain, from the university's Centre for Transport and Society.

"Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both "work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home, I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day.

On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work until I can actually concentrate on doing work.

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Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't paid for it.

This would include driving to the office.

It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train. You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it, but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but you shouldn't expect your employer to consider it work.

Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during the commute.

In Norway you have to be paid when you ‘are available to the job’. If you are on standby the minimum pay is 1/3. If you have to work outside your normal workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra.

If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.

That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost. The rest of the world can't pay for overhead like that.

Sure it can, as long as workers see that comp instead of shareholders.

The problem is America has become beholden to shareholders, and the narrative is you're unpatriotic or naive if you want to disrupt the status quo. The resources exist to appropriately compensate workers for their time.

Finland has roughly similar rules (without any oil production), though the rules differ depending on the industry.

Germany has similar employment laws, but i haven't read of oil around here.

>That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be competitive on cost.

When you can offload the consequences of poor planning or lack of foresight onto your employees (in the form of making them stay late, come in early, be on call or have arbitrary schedules, etc.) at zero cost, that's going to discourage good management and honest project planning.

If I don't have to pay a price for underestimating how long it will take to do something, then am I not subtly incentivized to lowball estimates for everything knowing that it's really no skin off my back if it takes longer than expected? It's all coming out of my employees' hides. There may be fuzzy, unquantifiable effects on morale, psychological health, creativity, etc. on my staff that hurt the organization in the long run, but compared to the hard data on quarterly returns they don't weigh as heavily.

I agree with you that there are strong arguments it is not reasonable to expect the employer to cover that cost but I don't think that implies that it isn't work!

....re-reading your comment you are obviously aware of this, please ignore :)

Yes, and it's included in your paycheck

But most of the times one could take advantage of it by living closer to the job and reducing commute time

I always wonder why people decide to leave faraway from work which isn't in any way cheaper if you include commute cost and time, for a room more

A room you don't use because you don't have time to use it

Best thing my parents taught me is living at walking distance from work

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