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> I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space

Now account for the money you don't spend commuting, and far more valuable, your lifetime saved by not spent commuting.

Then add back dissolving boundaries between work and personal lives, always being on call, constantly being interrupted, exhaustion from conference call improv performance art, etc.

> I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage

Your wage is already arbitrary so you can just assume that it includes this stipend.

Since wages are typically part of a contract, which requires or implies a meeting of the minds, any new assumptions resulting in a new interpretation of the contract and its applicability may support an argument for renegotiation of said contract.

In the US, wages are not typically part of a contract.

Oh, you do sign a contract, stating in details that you have no contractual relationship. ( 'at will' ) At least that was my experience in the last 6 years.

> I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space

Holy sense of entitlement. No, that's not going to happen. That's not how any of this works. You don't see companies paying outsourced workers $150k/yr due to the "amount of money they save by not hiring expensive talent in SF"

Given that "central" office expenses are taxed differently (more favorably) than payroll, it might make sense to pay "remote/wfh" office expense separately.

That being said, how do you calculate the amount? Say, if I rent a 3-bedroom apartment for €1200/mo, and use one of the bedrooms as my home office, is €400/mo reimbursement fair? What about if I work from a living room? What if I own the place I live in? Can I include ISP expense too? etc...

Solved in other societies already;

In Sweden you can claim a tax deduction on the square meterage of a room that is used exclusively for work, but it must have a locked door.

I live in an 82sqm apartment and I have a 2.5x2 (5sqm) room. So I can work out the percentage of the apartment that is office and file that as a deduction.

In my case roughly 6%.

Very similar rules apply for tax deduction of a home office in Germany.

I don't have a door that locks anywhere in my home. Not even to the outside.

Where I live (Canada) there is a similar deduction for a home office but no requirement about having a locking door. That would simple be unenforceable, since tax auditors have no right to enter your home to ensure deduction guidelines are being followed.

We do, however, have a mountain of paperwork to file for both you and your employer to vouch that working from home is a necessary part of the job, and you have to be swear that that portion of your home you claim is not used for non-work activities more that some small amount of time. My estimate was around 5% of my home.

I suspect there are going to be fireworks in the near future as tax legislation changes are debated, with the never-homers trying to quash the forward-thinkers and their changes to the system. I also foresee insurance companies jumping in to take their cut.

Can confirm.

But I don't think that yet applies to remote workers for established companies with offices?

I know contractors and self-run businesses qualify—but I'm not sure if the rest of us do just yet.

There are many expenses you can use as tax deductions as an independent contractor that you cannot if you are an independent contributor within a company.

Hadn't thought at all about the insurance implications. Gross...

>But I don't think that yet applies to remote workers for established companies with offices?

I am not an accountant and my understanding is that home office deduction in the US may be harder than in the past (and it's long been a red flag according to my tax guy.) However, I would think that the question isn't so much whether your company has offices but whether you're officially assigned to come into one of those offices whether or not you typically do.

I know if I ever wanted to take this deduction--which is probably not worth it for me--I'd have to get my office status officially changed.

This might be an example of the cart leading the horse.

Adding a lockable door is a reasonable requisite imo, if you're working from home full time and you're reducing the tax then the tax authority would prefer that you can't/won't use that space for personal use.

The Tax authority not being able to enter your home to ensure that does not remove the requisite of at least having a physically separated room, obviously there is give & take here. If you are given a bonus under the table from work that is also tax fraud.

Maybe solving this with a tax thing this way wasn't such a great idea after all.

Heh, what about making employees who want to go to a real office pay for the privilege (with pre-tax money, of course)? If a job must be done on-site, then management must justify it in their budget and have the proper incentives to avoid it if possible.

Totally soveable. We have tax accountants. We have real estate people. We have conventions for dealing with this sort of thing.

So then, when you save money on something else, do you give a portion of it back to the company?

On what, specifically? Generally, no. It's not like a company is giving away its money by not forcing their employees to commute.

On the other hand, whether companies should have to pay for individual home office space is a reasonable question (They don't have to provide free lunch at work, they don't have to pay for the commute, both of which are just as or more important for you to be able to work in an office) and will probably largely come down to regulation and, in the absence of that, market forces.

Should is meaningless in this context.

You're saying that, under certain circumstances, the company should pass on savings to its employees.

Or maybe it should reinvest that savings into R&D in order to secure a more stable future for its employees.

Or maybe it should reinvest that savings into marketing.

Or maybe it should use it to hire more employees.

Or maybe it should use it to increase the salary of its CEO who successfully led his/her workforce into a new paradigm while increasing productivity and cutting costs.

There's a lot of "shoulds" in this world. Unfortunately, they're often mutually exclusive and usually subjective.

You can expect whatever you want. That's what the salary negotiations are for. But I'm sure there would be plenty of people to out compete you. Just because company is saving money doesn't mean you get to pocket the difference, too.

All this talk of salaries overlooks the real reason why companies already spend astonishing amounts of money to move everyone to a premium office in an area of very expensive real estate and then damage their productivity by keeping them in a fancy but noisy open-plan office: conspicuous consumption.

Every organisation inevitably ends up producing a quantity of what I'm going to call "boss-ness" for those in charge. It's a significant factor in compensation. This holds true across capitalist, communist, distributed, and even voluntary organisations, and can be seen in groups as small as a single person.

All sorts of previously inexplicable things, such as executive travel, become easier to understand through this lens. Micromanagement and abuse of employees as well. Linus Torvald's free pass to be rude to people was also a part of his compensation, until it became far too expensive. As was sexual harassment of the female staff until that got mostly stamped out in the West; see Parton, D "Nine To Five" (1980), or the more recent Rubin case.

Remote employees produce less "boss-ness"; you can't look out across your desk farm and see them, you can't look over their shoulders (unless you go for the "desktop sharing and webcam at all times" model, which some places have).

This pandemic has made this observation abundantly clear to me at least. As David Graeber pointed out, there are a whole host of "bullshit jobs" out there.