Salaries Get Chopped for Many Americans Who Manage to Keep Jobs

definitely have it better than many, but it's a frustrating situation.

Then there are things like (increased) electricity costs, having to upgrade your home internet to sufficiently satisfy your work requirements (eg if you need to be downloading or uploading large files, or your company had stringent remote call quality requirements), etc.

If you're someone whose commute was little or no expense, then these can be a notable new expenditures to budget around. They won't break the bank but they're worth thinking about.

In addition, our utility bills have risen about 50% as now we're at home for 8 hours more per day. Extra heat (and soon A/C), water, electricity, etc.

Also, my "play" room is now my work room. How much extra should I be paid for my work environment to be permanently visible at all times? It's starting to affect my psyche. Luckily I had a play room to begin with, so my bedroom didn't have to become my work room too. I would have even more trouble sleeping in that case.

As someone who lives within walking distance of my office and rarely buys new clothing, I'm in the negative just without free coffee alone, let alone other amenities and increased costs at home.

https://gigazine.net/news/20200414-pc-shipments-2020-q1/

Many contractors claim tax deductions based on their rent or mortgage due to the fact that a percentage their home is used for business.

Note: this isn't actually my situation, but I'd be surprised if it was uncommon given that many programmers work in large cities.

The latter group was planning on working in an office and, perhaps, provisioned housing with that in mind. They may not have a guest room or space that can easily be used as an office. They may be sitting at a dining room table in an inflexible chair, bending their arms and wrist in uncomfortable ways and punishing their backs. They may have a laptop with a display that they planned to use only in meetings but now they are staring at it all day.

It's easy to make the case that people who made working from home a goal during their last search for employment don't need additional income during the quarantine; likely they made decisions about how they would pay for their homee office space and other expenses when they were looking for work and accepted a position.

I do think that employers should be footing some dollars to people working from home for the first time, for any real length of time, during quarantine. At the least they could provide equipment (docking stations, larger displays, keyboards, mice, proper chairs, etc.) to their employees. Whatever these employees are saving in terms of gas and commute time they are losing far more in the space from their home (no more dining room, etc.) and, if the quarantine continues for several months, the risk of RSI and back problems.

Why does this expense change categories to "eh, whatever" when it's coming out of my pocket instead of the business's?

(speaking from experience as someone who undercuts themselves a lot)

So let's talk about how it can be a valid argument, instead.

Employees expense computer equipment, cell phone bills, gas, car rentals, hotels, and more. I don't view this differently.

I'm working from my bedroom, we're already short on bedroom space; I'll gladly work from home for a fraction of what my employer pays to accommodate me in an office. But I probably wouldn't have taken this job knowing I'd be stuck in my bedroom 18 hours a day.

Very true. Most of us also aren’t paid for the value we produce. We get paid for the replacement cost.

I'm wondering if all these mentions of pay cuts are going to be something I should worry about. It seems farfetched for my current company (we're still hiring and growing) but I worry they would try to follow industry trends... So, I wonder if we're in the same industry.

It feels like if the employer is even considering working remotely then they're more interested in cutting salaries too. Seems like if your employer has no interest in remote work and sees it as a purely temporary situation then there will likely be no salary cuts. Or am I wrong? (Presuming revenue is still okay)

If you are earning $2000 a month, and the company knows that you were earning $1000 a month from the government, and they cut your pay to $1000 a month, you’re still only getting $2000 a month. Your overall financial health, and way of life has not changed one bit. you have simply replaced one source of income with another. You’re still making $2000 a month, the only difference is, the corporation doesn’t have to pay you. We have simply replaced one source of income with another. You’re still making $2000 a month, the only difference is, the corporation doesn’t have to pay you. If a Toyota Camry cost $10,000, and all customers are getting $1000 a month free from the government, then raise the price of the Camry to $11,000. Services and goods have not decreased in price, and I contend they will increase, resulting in absolutely zero positive affect. So what if you don’t have to depend on that employer for that extra thousand dollars, you’re depending on the government now. Which is better, depending on the government, or the free market Services and goods have not decreased in price, and I contend they will increase, resulting in absolutely zero positive affect. So what if you don’t have to depend on that employer for that extra thousand dollars, you’re depending on the government now. Which is better, depending on the government, or the free market?

Create money, put it into the economy at the bottom. Take it back out when it bubbles up to the top, and destroy it. Kind of like how your body creates red blood cells that bounce around transporting oxygen for about three months before breaking them down again.

There has been hardly any inflation in developed economies for the last thirty years. Japan and Germany have negative interest rates.

Yet the political wisdom of the day says that you can print money to bail out the banks, you can print money to inflate the stock market and yhats fine, but as soon as you try any kind of UBI\ help the poor, inflation will come for us all.

Speculation incoming: I would think it'd matter to whatever incumbent power at the state level gets called out on it and has to answer to angry constituents wondering why their government allowed a local agency to effectively squat on usable Federal dollars.

takes off rose-tinted glasses, remembers he lives in Illinois Hey wait a minute

If the stimulus bill had gone directly to that, then this might have made a lot more sense.

Forget UBI, the trillion dollars in PPP, if it was put into people's checking accounts as a reverse payroll tax might have had a very different (& aligned with consumerist values) economic result.

As in, take the "employee as a cost" out of the employer's books & turn every extra employee just extra hands to work at your business, just paid for by the negative taxes (this punishes the under-the-table payment tax dodges directly).

The fact that they gave PPP, without actually putting money into a paycheck absolutely sucked if your goal was to stop the money from slowing down in the economy.

A dollar I spend turns into many more dollars spent, than a dollar I saved.

But if I know I'm out on the street once that number drops to 0, I won't spend right now, even if it is a necessary purchase.

We really aren't. Between government pension plans, unemployment insurance, and all the welfare programs, I would challenge whether this is a real expectation at this point.

With the amount we pay in taxes, the ability to save is sharply limited.

When times are good, corporations are essentially making monthly payments to a bunch of local landlords (or banks) for the service of housing their employees.

I do find it a little strange that we didn't try to stick landlords and lenders with more of the bill. It'd be easier for corporations to keep employees staffed if they could reduce their salaries because their rent / mortgage payments were lower.

Now, it's true that the commercial (retail) real estate "sector" has created a more flexible and dynamic space for retail to operate in. Sign leases for just a year in case the idea doesn't work out etc. etc.

But it has also meant (1) a more encouraging environment for retail ideas that are even more likely to fail than the average (2) when business drops (e.g. covid-19), there's still the rent to pay.

It is true that in the past, the retail store owner-operator probably didn't own the premises outright, so there's still the mortgage payment when business drops. But that was (then) an arrangement with a bank (often local) who were going to be much more likely to see the mutual benefit of finding a way to not reposess the building.

This is just another small contributing factor to the overall fragility.

I mean, the gist is: The American economy is incredibly resilient, and it is showing during this. Yes it's true that jobless claims are increasing, but the expectation is that they will peak next week. While we won't be an overall growth year, the expectation is to close out the year at levels comparable to those in 2010.

In addition to that, the US is just incredibly resilient when compared to the rest of the world. The world still trades using our dollars, they still want to buy our bonds, they still want to invest in our companies. All of this stuff ends up benefiting the US job seeker, and the American family because it means that there are jobs, stability, and the ability to pass monetary policy that protects them in times of crisis.

If you want specific details, there is hours of content that I linked that will explain explicitly why. \\

It's largely because people—especially the poorest people—have been laid off to protect businesses' balance sheets, and have received a meager attempt at counterbalancing that from the government.

There is absolutely no reason any human needs to starve in the modern world. If we as a society prioritized people's lives and welfare over businesses' profitability—and expressed those priorities consistently through our voting decisions—we could eliminate hunger in America without any kind of serious (or even noticeable) hardship to the rest of us.

The flip side of cheap money is inflation, and it's been building up in the economy since the 2007 crisis. The inflation has been hidden by stagnant wages and falling commodity prices from globalization, so it's led to "top heavy" inflation -- the value of a dollar has been shrinking as the supply of dollars has increased, but that extra supply of dollars has been almost exclusively concentrated in equity markets. Prices of goods have remained in check because the vast majority of people simply don't have access to most of the new money. See also all the US companies sitting on hundreds of billions in cash, stock buybacks, and corporate debt.

I believe the US has 2 economies: one denominated in dollars, the other denominated in millions of dollars. It wasn't seen as "inflation" because most of the inflation indicators used by the federal reserve target the consumer economy. I think we're about to have a really bad decade as all this starts to unwind. The housing market is the first place this will hit (and we're seeing it already); capital will start to flow into REITs buying up residential properties and we'll see prices stay high even or even rise in an economy when they shouldn't be. All but the wealthiest individuals will be priced out of the market (this is already the case in many cities). That means more renters, higher rents, and zoning laws that prevent new housing starts.

The two economies will start to bleed together in the margins between the millionaire economy and the individual economy -- with disastrous results for the people of the country.

We're quickly seeing serverless in cloud computing and the equivalent in human capital is inevitable with unemployed and underemployed as well as a high minimum wage with an ever increasing inflation and cost of living. The unpredictable COVID-19 pandemic along with predictable spikes in demand (Black Friday) just accelerate this need.

If that is where the world is going, then, yeah I would prefer to have a head start.