What I find offensive is the notion that workers consider a 10-25% increase in hours as commensurate with a 5% pay cut. End commuting. It's unpaid labor.
1.5 hours each way * 5 days a week = 15 hours a week That's 780 hours a year (not including holidays/sick leave etc) That's 32.5 24 hour days! One whole calendar month sat in my car each year.
As soon I did that maths it was only a question of time before I quit.
Dropping your commute isn't an entirely selfish idea.
Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?
People should realize that comfortable car-centric lifestyles are too expensive for them to afford. I’m talking from the perspective of a Western European country.
I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.
Personally I find standing on a train for 45 minutes each way, and not being able to do small household errands on my breaks, like I can when I work from home, means my entire Mon-Fri is a cycle of sleep-eat-commute-work with no time to tend to anything.
It's a shock to the system.
That said, I switched rolls for twice the money, not 5%, and hybrid work will hopefully be something I can move to in a couple of months.
Some people I know are bachelors who don't cook (weird lifestyle, but it takes all sorts I guess) so employers with canteens are a big attraction for them.
Other people, I suspect, have reasons for getting back to the office that they're a bit shy about. Joking that you're just here for the coffee preserves your status and privacy better than saying you're back in the office because your house is tiny / your kids are uncontrollable / you struggled with mental health issues.
Switched jobs that is 100% back to office but quadrupled my pay (and significant boost in company brand name too), otherwise I’d be disgruntled.
The commute into NYC is as miserable of an experience and a huge collective waste of time.
But a lot of my coworkers on my new team love the fact that they can eat breakfast lunch and dinner at the office for free. Then again they are all young and single.
If the extra pay for the extra commute is offensively low, don't take the offer.
(That said, I'm happy remote-first is getting more common.)