Unpaid commute... I know lots of folks in the Bay area spending hours per day commuting (and NOVA/DC area, if you live there you know). I'm not sure why it isn't considered stolen wages.
My office used to be just outside of Boston. Could I move to Utica, NY and claim that my 8 hour round-trip was the entirety of my work obligation and that I was, by definition, "meeting expectations" merely by driving back and forth every workday?
1. HN users are not “everyone in the world”
2. Compared to the normal population, software engineers, near equivalent tech professionals, and people working in the sciences or medical industry disproportionately represent most of HN users based on the content being posted.
I drive 85 minutes one direction to work a $25/hr helpdesk job right now.
Barely making ends meet. Gas + car maintenance is killing me slowly.
Your employer has a right to set their terms of employment and you have a right to tell them to pound sand if you don't want to abide by them.
Three years ago, if you'd skip over any employer not offering fully remote, you'd simply not find a job. So your "right" has no meaning.
Because the employer isn’t choosing where you live. If they did, then, sure, the commute time would be a cost they imposed, rather than a cost imposed by your choice of residence.
Are the jobs that don’t work from home start paying more to compensate for the lesser quality of work life?
This is compounded in the bay area by its ridiculous housing market.
It turns out that it's not actually my choice to live somewhere that requires commuting to a work location dictated by my employer.
How about your employer has to cover the rent or mortgage of an average single-family unit within a 30-minute rush hour commute of the office if they require you to come in?
People opt-in to jobs and the associated commutes completely voluntarily and consensually.
Not necessarily true. Some employers offer company buses to/from certain cities, with wifi, and they count that as working hours.
Yes, effectively your company is choosing to send your worksite to (a place closer to) your home, so that you can start working sooner and stop working later.
I bet that if employers were legally mandated to pay their workers for the time they commute, that those employers would suddenly see effective reserved private transit as a competitive advantage.
edit: I can't be bothered to fix the formatting of this message.
In society, we recognize that one cannot always have a fully 'consensual' agreement between parties of wildly different levels of power. The only reason this hasn't been extended to corporations is because our political system serves them, not the common man.
It's not. It never has been. If I disagree with the terms of my employment, me being unemployed is a far higher burden than the company not having one extra worker. To act like the employee and employer are equals in negotiation is laughable.
It's also good to appreciate what even a well-paid 21st C knowledge worker has in common with other labor, including coal miners. Solidarity helps achieve goals.
Unions do exist there, however they probably do more harm than good for software engineers because they effectively do not allow raising salaries if needed (any rise in every employment contract needs approval by the union).
Like if 2 people get hired into the same role at the same time and one decides to rent a small apartment near the subway and the other decides to drive 45 miles to a suburb, why is the company on the hook to then compensate them differently?
Or am I misunderstanding the argument?
You've not answered the question, instead pointing out that some people have wages that encourage a commute (at the moment we can probably at least assume that they are choosing that job over other choices, for reasons left unexplored as of yet).
Like, the low paying jobs that don't have nearby housing options probably do have to increase compensation to make up for the lack of housing options. Why is it good policy to force the employer to treat the commute as part of the work day vs working to improve the generally available housing and transport options?