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Comment by kristjansson | Hacker News Reader

This has been litigated in the past, and rejected on the theory that the employer doesn't mandate where you live, so they length of commute is effectively the employee's choice.

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On top of this, Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk (2014) found that employers do not need to compensate workers for time spent waiting in line for security screenings. At the time, some workers were spending 2.5hrs/week in lines before and after their shifts.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-supreme-cou...

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/integrity-staffi...

Those cases are about a decade old, and I believe they would have been overturned (at least in CA) by a recent CA Supreme Court case: https://shawlawgroup.com/2020/02/california-supreme-court-ap...

I love these interpretations. They're at the same time literally true, but completely out of touch with reality. I guess a minimum wage worker at a fast food joint in Manhattan is free to choose to live right next to his job, am I right?

Live right next to their job in Manhattan as in being homeless, I guess.

You understand that you don't actually have to live in Manhattan if your career goal is to work in a fast food joint, right?

Contrived hypotheticals don't actually address the issue under discussion.

There are, in fact, fast food restaurants in Manhattan.

Anyone know if they pay better than ones elsewhere? Or what other things enable them to recruit staff?

Glassdoor.com suggests that McDonald's in NYC pays crew members and cashiers about $36-37k/year and managers around $129k/year.

The national minimum wage of $7.25/hour works out to about $12k/year, so that's about three times as much.

New York State has a higher minimum wage, $14.20/hour. That works out to about $24k/year, so NYC McDonalds is still paying considerably more.

Wow. For contrast, central London McDonalds is paying about 10 GBP per hour for crew - which is the UK legal minimum wage and as of today equivalent to 12 USD.

The counterpoint gets far more absurd. Should you expect to be able to move to a different state and have the employer fly you to work and back each day, or would that be entirely unreasonable?

The employer could choose not to employ anyone who lives more than X distance away. Many already do.

It's not an unsolvable problem. Free bus passes for people who live close enough to ride a bus, and some kind of sliding scale beyond that.

Or look up the national average or industry average or metropolitan area average commute time/distance, and build something around that.

Or give a $1000 stipend to every employee to either spend on gas for daily commutes or two flights a year to come visit.

Could certainly figure something out if there was sufficient motivation to do so.

I don't think it'd be one-size-fits-all either. There might be some situations where you need to cast a wider net and incentivize people to travel more to your job. There might be other situations where you want people to be living closer to where they work.

This however always has been on the basis that a job couldn’t be done from anywhere

> the employer doesn't mandate

But employers do mandate where you live by not allowing you to live in their office. Therefore commuting is not a choice it’s a requirement. Even if you live across the road you still need to spend time going to work and back.

Twitter actually tried to provide accommodations in their offices recently and ran into issues because of zoning and permitting. Some occupations (i.e. firefighters, doctors) do have short-term accommodation on the premises. It's complicated and may not be entirely down to decisions by the employer is my overall point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/07/twitter-s...

It is not complicated at all, if you do it during the construction stage. The thing is, you can't just randomly turn office suites into bedrooms like that.

Commercial buildings have different structural integrity, plumbing requirements, accessibility requirements, fire defense requirements, and so on compared to residential housing. A space that might be deemed safe to have 100 people working inside of, may not be deemed safe to have 10 people sleeping inside of for those reasons.

But the law could be changed. Or unions could negotiate those policies.

And that is to some degree also fair. Both sides have a point in this discussion.

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