But should location based pay be just accepted because that's the norm? There are variables that can't be used to do discriminate like age, gender, race, sexual orientation etc. We've accepted equal pay for equal work in these cases. Is it that far fetched that even location should be treated the same?
It’s got nothing to do with discrimination, it’s purely about hiring for the lowest cost. They have to pay more in EU and US to get employees, and less wherever you live.
The opportunity cost of not having that senior dev on board for more than 3 months is damaging for rest of the team and company goals/time lines. In the current market, my guess is that this person would be replaced with someone NOT in that location unless for some reason it is business critical to have someone in that area, which is almost never for software developers.
I work with HR team who sets compensations for our global workforce. If you think that HR and leadership does not take this opportunity cost in consideration when setting policies, you are badly mistaken. They are very rational in their decision making.
This is the point that doesn't make any sense. If it costs them X in OP's locale and 2X in EU, the company should kick them out if they decided to move and replace them with someone in the original locale, or maybe someplace even cheaper.
Because of that, the rare employee who does move can be paid the new location wage without increasing the costs of the people who don’t move. Companies don’t care about the costs of the <5% of people who move. They care about the costs of the >95% who don’t.
(Side note: There are companies who budget in headcount and work like GP suggests. I think most companies budget in money and work like you suggest.)
If we don't accept location based pay and start paying a uniform global salary, the wages will sync to Asian job market level rather than rising to SV level. Any company doing so will not be able to hire anyone in SV.
OTOH any company paying SV level wages to everyone will do so only for a short while before they realize that they can increase the profit by reducing pay elsewhere. Why would they not do that?
So do you advocate uniform global salaries across different locations in different countries?
And then obviously from the capitalist perspective, your employment only exists to the extent that the employer derives more value from your work than they pay you.
Sadly some careers pay more then others but that’s life. It’s why I worry about the education system eventually crumbling, since teaching and in some countries even healthcare professionals are woefully underpaid. I wish it wasn’t the case but some people get lucky and others successfully follow the money, whilst society allows governments and or private industries to milk human kindness for as much as it can get away with.
Plus I don't work. I'm disabled I collect SSI I get like $10,000 a year. That's it! I can't have more than $2k in my bank account. I can't invest. So uh, have fun making tons of money I could only imagine.
You're experiencing alienation from the fruits of your labor. Your labor being exploited to maximize profit. Unfortunately, the comments here are right. It "makes sense" in the sense these experiences are characteristic of life within capitalism as a laborer.
Functionally, your location is being "colonized," so to speak, by capital. I don't know if there's a real phrase for it, but I suppose it could be described as "telecolonization." Management has found a resource (your labor) that can be cheaply extracted by alienating you, the "telecolonized," from the value your labor creates.
It is bullshit. If you want solutions, your recourse is either collective action/unionization or finding a new job. You're being exploited by capital more than your coworkers. That is the context from which this sense of unfairness arises, I believe.
To put it another way: Yes, zero exploitation of OP's labor is less than "some" exploitation of OP's labor.
It clarifies things for me to replace "cheaper labor" with "more profitable labor". Why would a company refuse to hire more profitable labor? How could the company not having any relationship with OP exploit his labor more than hiring him as more profitable labor?
Sure, because the foreign company exercises their access to capital to compete at a wage level that local companies can't compete with, but is still as low as possible to extract maximum value from the investment made by purchasing the worker's labor. Why do you think there's such inequality in economic opportunity, such that exploiting labor in this fashion is possible, in the first place?
> Is that exploitation any more than the US employee not getting paid 2x or 5 or 100 their current rate?
I'm not making any comparative assertions here. You seem to be making the case (by implication of your question) that in your opinion it's good for OP he's getting the opportunity to be exploited. And I'm just saying, it's exploitation. It is what it is.
The USD exchange rate is just too good for exporation of goods and services. They simply offer more, despite the wage arbitrage. More money, more benefits. The typical US software developer salary is a truly ridiculous amount of money here due to the 5x multiplier, and even a fraction of it outcompetes every local enterprise I've ever seen.
I know exactly how it feels to see people in developed countries making 10 times what people here make on average.
You really think they won’t just stop hiring people from that country if they “took action”? Or if they could get another job at a higher rate they wouldn’t?
My take on the subject is they are providing the OP with an opportunity which they otherwise wouldn’t have due to the current job market in their country in exchange for a rate of pay that is relative to said job market.
Maybe it sucks, maybe it’s unfair (it isn’t) but it is preferable to the alternative which is to not have a good paying job.
> If the company is willing to pay me that amount in a different location, why can't it pay me the same here?