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"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

nityesh.com

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Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#41

Post by refurb »

I think calling it a COL adjustment is the problem. It’s not. It’s a supply and demand issue.

There are a limited pool of people willing to move to the Bay Area (I’ve had this discussion with my HR before - great candidate, great package, they look at rent and say “nah”).

If your pool of potential employees goes from X in the Bay Area to 10 * X across all 50 states, that increase in supply will impact wages.

That guy making $100,000 in Ohio who wouldn’t take a $175,000 salary in the Bay Area might be very willing to take $150,000 if he doesn’t have to move.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#42

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

asdfaoeu wrote: post #17

Salaries are based on market rates not "cost of living". If you want your employer to pay a higher salary either move to another city where they would pay more or find another company. There's not much else you can do that would convince your company otherwise.

Why not just tell you live in another city?

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#43

Post by jacknews »

mantap wrote: post #32

Cost of living is a swindle, at least when it applies internationally and cross culturally. If you want to live like a local in Jakarta (to use an extreme example), you can do so very cheaply, $180 a month for a room, eat rice for breakfast lunch and dinner. If you want to live like a San Franciscan in Jakarta, it will cost as much if not more as in San Francisco. An apartment will cost several thousand dollars a mon…

Exactly. It's basically a scam to try and pay people in 'poor' countries less.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#44

Post by tawan »

The disconnect in this conversation between employer and employee happens for these reasons: In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

Now comes the pandemic which forces - or should I say “allows” - companies to try out the remote model in unison without the risk of being the first mover.

It turns out that it works good enough. But then a company must be questioning why it should continue paying the location premium to employees if it doesn’t see any benefit in it anymore. Adjusting existing salaries downwards, even though the employees didn’t make any changes in their commitment, is socially unacceptable.

Now companies hope that if an employee decides to take advantage of the new freedoms they have an open for this conversation where they try to cut the location premium based on COL arguments, which they know is not the real reason.

If it would be up to companies alone, they would have already reduced all our salaries and if we wouldn’t have liked that, they would have said.. well just move to a lower COL area, we don’t mind

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#45

Post by zrth »

difosfor wrote: post #7

Supporting remote work can come at a cost to an employer so it does make some sense to me to offer less money in those cases and inversely, more money if you move to their town to work there. Other than that equal pay is more fair indeed. I think things have mostly gotten crazy along with some housing markets. Perhaps this will slowly disperse the extreme concentrations of wealth throughout countries with employers o…

I'm a bit surprised about the assumption that remote work is more expensive than on site work for the company. I guess it could depend on the location of the company's office.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#46

Post by [deleted] »

rich_sasha wrote: post #26
ForHackernews wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract This seems like a purely semantic distinction to me. Unless you're religious and believe that humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" then everything you're claiming as a 'right' is just some generally-agreed social principle that your ancestors fought hard to establish.

There's a secular right and wrong too. It's not that murder is OK, with a fee of life sentence. It is wrong and should never be done, and backed up by legal penalties.

[deleted]

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#47

Post by jacknews »

rich_sasha wrote: post #5

This, and similar moans, really misses the point. Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions: * Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. * Employees, and the society made up of employees, want stability, employment rights etc. as salary work is…

In other fields, these kinds of paradoxes often indicate that a system is broken, or is not applicable.

Perhaps free markets are not really the right system to apply when managing human resources, and especially to distributing the fruits of our collective efforts.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#48

Post by IshKebab »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #42
asdfaoeu wrote: post #17

Salaries are based on market rates not "cost of living". If you want your employer to pay a higher salary either move to another city where they would pay more or find another company. There's not much else you can do that would convince your company otherwise.

Why not just tell you live in another city?

Because that's very dishonest and you'd probably be fired for it if they found out.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#49

Post by benjaminjosephw »

bananaface wrote: post #40
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #31

> Competitive, and not monopolistic, markets, produce the best outcomes for all consumers. If you subscribe to this belief, then an increased competition between the governments can only result in an increase in standard of living of everyone in the world. 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…

Are you arguing that Indian employees should earn less because it's better for Indian employers?

I'm arguing that Indian tech companies are disadvantaged if all the best software engineers in India work for American companies. So are Indian consumers if there are fewer local companies solving local problems (and selling at local price-points).
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