"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

It's one thing to allow remote workers from one country to work from anywhere in the world. It's a completely different thing to create a universal and homogenized labour market for tech work.

Universal salaries would allow established and well funded companies to hire anyone anywhere at massively unfair non-local salaries. Individuals would be better off but the job market for equivalent local jobs would suffer and, as a result, new companies in those nations would suffer too.

The difference in purchasing power of the established tech companies in rich nations would annihilate the local labour market competition. It would become next to impossible for non-rich-nation startups to hire the best talent because of the huge opportunity costs potential employees would face. Exporting the benefits of economic privilege like this at the expense of host nations is textbook economic imperialism[0].

Individual benefit isn't the only lens that this issue needs to be examined through.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism

I would think what is documented and certified when filing taxes will be important, perhaps retroactively. Jobs and new software tools may pop up to help companies better understand their geographically distributed workforce from an accounting perspective. Employees with legal challenges (past or present) have the potential to reduce productivity.

The conversation in the future will be "Why would I hire you in SF and pay you three times what I'm paying in Alabama? You're equivalent guys doing the same work."

The concept of the "standard" will shift from the highest-paid locale to the lowest, and "Cost of Living Adjustment" will be something that employees in San Francisco plead for, not something that employees in Libya complain about.

The only way out of this will be to rebut the assertion "you're doing the same work," i.e. to have skills that are globally unique. Not that you have to be Jeff Dean to keep a job, but that you have to be a whole lot more capable than your peers, the same way that a product is not assumed to be manufactured in America unless there is a compelling reason to.

Sure, average salaries will probably drop from SF ones. Rich companies will save some more money. Startups who have some mental flexibility will be able to snatch some good hires. Employees stuck in cheap countries will get more offers. Countries' economies will have a push to improve or become even more irrelevant. Politicians will steal even more taxes from remote workers. More people will start their own business.

The market and the world will go on.

But in the latter case, they should also be paying people with families more than singles, for example. Since that is not the case, I can't see how they can justify 'cost of living' adjustments.

Quite apart from the fact that the cost-of-living indices are often wildly incomparable. For example, sending your kids to a state school in Norway, vs for example Equatorial Guinea.

Obviously in the latter case, you actually need to send the kids to an often ludicrously expensive expat school to obtain even the same ball-park level of education, and so even though the cost of just living may be much lower, it is actually more expensive to maintain a comparable lifestyle.