Amazon Engineer Sues for Work from Home Costs
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The first is a flimsy premise because companies simply don't have the power to take WFH away and I think they know that. If they did, they would. But the collectivization for WFH, brought by lockdowns, is far too powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it's a hiring advantage for your competitors if you attempt to bar WFH.
The second point is just lazy. Billing for fractional usage is not impossible nor difficult, and you can bet if a company was billing a customer for fractional usage, they would have it down to an exact science. In fact, the resistance on this point shows the weakness of their position from the first point.
I do have some sympathy for the people who like to go to an office and interact with people face to face. But we've been operating with their preference as the default for a long time, so they can learn to adapt now.
I've seen a bunch of well-known companies now that have office space in WeWork's or similar co-working spaces in lieu of having their own office and wonder if this is a decent alternative to forcing a return to office. It also opened up traveling a bit more since I can go to any location and have reliable internet/space for taking calls.
My own company actually did this and got rid of their San Francisco office and instead renting an office in a WeWork in the area and giving San Francisco area employees a membership.
And I think if they do it right they can have it avoid some tax, also. But I’m not an expert in that area.
I'm guessing the desire is for it to come out of the company's profits, so investors pay.
Is there a free lunch to be had?
As a counterpoint to your anecdote, I also just started a new job remotely at a company where they invested time and effort into their onboarding experience and it was miles better at preparing me for my role than when I onboarded at my previous two companies in person.
The onboarding was terrible for the local govt. Mostly focused on legal aspects-they expected me to have office communication skills off the bat and they offered little for training with mobile techs that I was hired to do (I just did one or two projects and they assumed I already had full experience). The office politics were dreadful. Lots of meetings where things were not decided and often missing people that could answer questions. When you reach out by email, they just visit you by your desk, ask clarifying questions and explain things verbally, often referring to a site that I have to manually type in.
The large tech company had a terrific 3 month onboarding process and I was slowly eased by senior members into taking on the more repetitive work. I learned more about the company in two weeks then I did for my 6 months for that govt. If there is a question, I can reach out by email and setup an inpromptu google meet-links and commands to use are shared in the chat and easily used and tested. Decisions were made and I am building connections in the industry with people in and outside of work that do not work in my area.
I'm really surprised that a company like Amazon can't figure this out.
I work for a stupendously technologically backward company, and even it covers WFH internet costs up to $80/month.
This just seems like laziness of the management, and not any actual problem.
What I fear is the company wants to collect data on said usage as a solution to reimburse you accurately. Which means you send your employer usage data. Another world I don't want to live in.
> I do have some sympathy for the people who like to go to an office and interact with people face to face.
I think we're arriving at a compromise with hybrid work. Also, regarding gas commute costs, my employer still gives me a public transit card making bus and train usage free. I'm willing to make the trade for more home utility costs to avoid commute costs, even if I'm lucky enough to be able to use public transportation.
IMO though full remote is not without serious downsides for the workers as well. Globalized market with localized salaries and alienation being just two of them. Being in my third year of fully remote I can testify to the second one.
Electricity metering is a solved problem, simply put all the office receptacles and lights on a single circuit and use a CT (current transformer) and a 120v submeter [0] to record energy usage. Landlords use these for tenant energy monitoring and billing in commercial real estate.
[0] https://www.leviton.com/en/products/1n120-1d
Honeywell even makes a 25A model under the name Emon Dmon: https://prod-edam.honeywell.com/content/dam/honeywell-edam/h...
Right now Amazon and Google have to compete with a startup that is offering a competitive salary and fully remote positions. Can the startup survive if employees start billing them for the cost of their home office?
Not recommending tax fraud, but as a practical matter, these are non-issues.
> The first is a flimsy premise because companies simply don't have the power to take WFH away and I think they know that.
If you view this from the position of power dynamics, reality is the issuer of paychecks will eventually win, especially because they will be driven by fear of lawsuits like this. This isn't the first time people got ran out of the office: back when 9/11 happened, everyone went remote, loved it, and then had to go back. Yes, tech wasn't as good, but we had WebEx (slow internet, though), instant messaging (better than slack & friends) and email.
> So powerful, in fact, that it's a hiring advantage for your competitors if you attempt to bar WFH.
I'm not so sure this is the case. For a lot of people, there was not a salary adjustment when COVID set them free of the office. A lot of people moved to lower cost areas... and kept their salary. Eventually, salaries will normalize to local prevailing wage, plus or minus for the job title and positioning of the job (i.e. we are a better employer and have better pay and benefits) and companies will use a round of layoffs to adjust this. It makes no sense to pay a developer SV salary if they are in Modoc, Indiana or moved to Estonia now.
> Billing for fractional usage is not impossible nor difficult, and you can bet if a company was billing a customer for fractional usage, they would have it down to an exact science.
The point the article is making is that employees suing over de minimus costs is really bad for workers. The energy star tag on my monitor and laptop say I can power both for $28 per year. The guy in the article is suing over $50-$100/month. Seems like there's a lot to argue about... so there is substantial risk. It will cost the employer $18k-$50k to deal with the lawsuit.
It will be interesting to see whether the courts see a difference between incremental expenses vs things the employee was already purchasing (e.g. internet vs electricity)
But I don't agree with the overall conclusion. Ultimately the cost of an employee boils down to one number. If they have to pay 15k for home office rent then salary will just be 15k less.
Probably better to put an upper salary bound on it. Stops the abuse of minimum wage workers while avoiding most of the silliness.
I mean, if you assume a monopsony where market clearing prices are set by demand alone, with no supply side effect, sure.
> My best bet? The Amazon engineer will win.
> And then he and every other California employee will lose. Here's why.
In the absolute best case, this will become a class action lawsuit. All ~4000 employees will get a couple thousand dollars as reimbursement. Lawyers will make a few million. Amazon will find the money from under some couch cushion. And then they will allocate a portion of everyone's salary to "WFH expenses" to be in the clear legally. Meanwhile the plaintiff's name will be all over the news and their future job prospects will take a huge hit.
However, it could make sense that if they initially worked from home, then had to start commuting, the company should pay for gas, car maintenance, tolls, public transportation, etc.
Then, the same goes in reverse, if the worker agreed to the salary working from the office, when forced to work from home, they could make a case of the company having to pay for monitors, a desk, electricity, a faster internet, etc.
I have made decisions to live close to my offices, not just for commute but because I consider myself responsible to go in when things break and spending 1.5hrs commuting won't do that.
When I priced it up when I lived in London it came out to be about the same cost to live closer to the office than to commute even with public transport (which is not horrendously expensive) -- assuming I paid myself what my boss would pay me for my time commuting.
I know Palantir at least have explicit bonuses for living within some distance of the office. It can’t be that uncommon.
Not if it is treated as expense reimbursement instead of salary.
But mode of transportation is mostly left to the individual. They pay you enough and you can decide where to live and how to commute. Everybody’s needs are different — why have a program?
If you want a long train commute because you enjoy audiobooks and living near woodlands, great. If you want a studio apartment in the building next to the office, great. If you live halfway across the city but are already dropping your kid off at school next to the office, great.
The employer doesn’t need to know or become invested in any of those choices. Otherwise, we end up on a road where employers push for you to live in ways that are most appropriate to their financial interests. No thanks.
That said, many employers do offer things like universally available metro passes or gas cards as a token acknowledgment of commute costs more broadly. That seems like a good balance of autonomy and support.
Money for work is simple and easy for both sides.
But that's not a thing to be discussed in court. It's a thing to be publicly discussed in political terms to arrive at a CLEAR and defined norm for WFH. In some country such norms already exists but are a bit old, meant for another tech era, in some others do not exists at all.
For instance in Italy there are two norms, the ancient clear but hard, a new one opaque and obscene. The first is for "teleworking", it MANDATE an empty room, inspectable by a public body responsible for safety at work, locked, furnished by the company, with dedicated services provided by the company etc. The second is "smart working" witch essentially state that workers and companies agree a kind of place-less, by-target works no one surveil, the company just provide a craptop and a crapphone and all are f** and happy. Clearly both norms are not good at all.
For instance we need to separate time-defined jobs (like call centers, banking, ...) to potentially async ones (like development) and so regulate them accordingly. We need to define "a home workspace" but without exaggerations like the Italian "telelavoro" laws etc. To do so discussing is mandatory, and courts are not a good place to discuss and negotiate...
Electricity can be deducted on my taxes, but I need a seperate meter if I want to do that.
I did actually read one of the recent corporate policies and they will pay up to $30/month toward home internet, but only for those who are full time WFH (not related to COVID). I haven't bothered to do it. It's a lot of hassle for $30.
That conversation often evolves sometimes in to one of two separate discussions: "then give me a work phone" or "then hire an overnight crew".
In a similar vein, commute costs ( by public transit) and food at lunch are covered at 50% or more, because they're making you come into an officr. Of course with remote work those no longer apply.
Offices cost money, much more money than configuring an enterprise for remote work. There's always that minor percentage of employees who cannot develop successful patterns to work from home. As the pandemic showed, these folks are the minority today.
Under this paradigm, as long as remote work costs less than a building then remote work should be attractive to a company. Yet, many companies are chasing hybrid models even though that direction causes a good bit of attrition as well (people want the whole thing).
My personal hypothesis is that companies are doing an organized, long term pull out of offices, but are resisting doing it all at once because they'd impact each other's commercial property values. This confusing state we're in is purposeful.
I doubt it, because most companies rent their space and they wouldn't care about the impact to the building. I think your premise is flawed:
> There's always that minor percentage of employees who cannot develop successful patterns to work from home. As the pandemic showed, these folks are the minority today.
Sure, maybe most people can develop 'successful patterns', but that doesn't mean that most people are most productive at home (in the eyes of company heads). The term 'successful patterns' is relative given the situation, and right now that means doing the best we can given the circumstances.
An empty building, or even a partially filled building, still costs a lot of money to keep. Having that expense when they aren't using it and can't see the value must drive the finance guys nuts. So if the company is paying for a space for an employee in the office, and they are playing for their expenses at home, the cost of that employee's workspace just doubled.
I remember when we went WFH and I was so cheesed over the disruptions in Teams meeting when colleagues used those shitty $10 Chinese made earbuds - asked management to at least supply everybody with a Plantronics headset so we don't waste time.
I was told - we are professionals (we need to buy our own shit) - end of story
Which is funny because "professionals" in every other field will absolutely bill you for cost of materials/equipment for a job.
We also completely ran out of "old" stuff, in the junk room, where people didn't want a new screen/keyboard but one exactly (exactly) like the one they had in the office.
We didn't try anything for heating and electricity though. How much do you actually use, if your use is normal office type stuff?
Is this personal or for work?
As an aside, here in India, most companies do reimburse internet charges. But then broadband internet is quite cheap here - my 300Mbps connection only costs me around $25/month.