I have run an mostly remote company for 11 years and have 200 employees. I paid my in office employees more for several reasons:
-Smaller pool of people to choose from as it is geographically limited.
-Office workers have an average of two extra hours per day of overhead... Getting up and dressed, driving to work, spending a lot of time away from family, etc.
But didn't the remote employees feel discriminated? It might become a real problem if there 2 people in the exact same role, one working remotely & the other in office.
Yes, some of them did. But I always explained these reasons openly and told remote people if they wanted to come into the office, they would make more.
In the long run it will balance itself out as more employers get comfortable with remote workers and start poaching each other's employees via pay increases. Poaching will be easier to accomplish for remote employees and the switch between employers likely will be less of a hassle for the employee since they'll be staying in the same place (their home) and only changing their online environment and maybe the laptop they use.
True, but companies will then learn a lesson the hard way. They will see unhappy employees leaving their company, figure there's a problem due to discrimination in compensation and then try to fix it.