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"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

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

#441

Post by whateveracct »

NationalPark wrote: post #366
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #140

This will happen but people will should not be surprised that we all get paid Topeka KS salaries not San Francisco CA salaries. The long term strategy of location pay differentials may seem like punishing people for leaving SF, but it's the opposite. I've been paid 80% of SF rate to live in the middle of nowhere and anyone else who has done this will realize it's an amazing deal. When a 3000 sq ft house costs conside…

Speak for yourself, but you'd have to pay me even more to live in the middle of nowhere than in a city, and this doesn't seem to be an uncommon preference. Especially if you're young, single, have disposable income, and lean left politically, which is probably most of the remote tech workers who have these options.

SF vs Kansas are two extremes though. You can live in the suburbs of another urban center with cheaper CoL and have similar effects. For instance, the Seattle/Tacoma area (which also has easy access to an airport with short flights to SFO and SJC.)

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

#442

Post by pc86 »

boc wrote: post #244
throwaway2245 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your compensation is a function of your negotiating power That's right, I suppose: But, why do I have more negotiating power, if I can sufficiently fake an address in San Francisco? This is just a way for employers to exert their power and reduce salaries across the board. It should be resisted.

Faking an address would work until you are expected to meet up with your team in person. If it turns out that you actually live in Bend, the gig will be up pretty quickly.

There is no scenario where you can be a remote employee and still be reasonably expected to meet in person with such short notice that you couldn't make the trip if it's actually worth the pay differential.

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

#443

Post by philwelch »

aeternum wrote: post #424
whimsicalism wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not a marketplace failure. Remove the subsidies and the market would quickly find the higher price at which dairy farmers could produce milk profitably and consumers would purchase it. If it is in our societal interest to produce more milk so people can eat, and the market doesn't do so, requiring subsidy, then that is a failure of the market to meet society's need. You're conflating the failure of a marketplace to…

Is excess milk production really a social need though? According to the market people would generally rather spend that money elsewhere. Via the subsidy the U.S. is forcing everyone to spend a small portion of their income on milk production.

Farm subsidies generally serve a few purposes in the US:

1. Maintaining the political support of farmers

2. Maintaining surplus food production capacity in case of some contingency (e.g. war).

The same is true for many developed countries. The US government actually produced “government cheese” with surplus milk to help support dairy farmers, providing the cheese to schools and welfare recipients. The EU has also experienced subsidy-related supply surpluses, including a “butter mountain” and a “wine lake”.

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

#444

Post by darth_avocado »

No, equal pay for equal work, especially in remote jobs isn't going to work. Why is it that for almost the entire history of man, we've had wages decided based on COL, and suddenly when it comes to tech bros who are seeing a pay cut, we are all up in the arms?

A Starbucks barista in SF gets paid one and half times that in Oklahoma. They do equal work, just different locations. A lady in the Zara sweatshops in Bangladesh gets paid a dollar for the entire day, while a lady in a luxury boutique in LA probably earns 100x that. They do the same jobs, why don't we all globally decide the pay in a single currency?

Simple answer: economics. Adjusting for COL was always a thing, moving away from a high COL area always meant a pay cut. Similarly anyone who moved from India or China or Europe to the Bay, got a pay hike. And the reason this happens is supply and demand. Some people are valuable enough to companies that regardless of where they live they get the same money. Bezos or Musk can move to Madagascar for all they care. For 99.999999999% of the rest, we are replaceable. If you're gonna move to Indiana and demand Bay Area salaries, there'll be plenty of people there who can do your job for less with the same set of skills. And if not in Indiana, somewhere else, maybe India. Economics. Simple. Otherwise, we'd all be drinking $200 coffees and $500 avocado toasts.

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

#445

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

nivenkos wrote: post #237
lgleason wrote: post #89

If you live in the US and are advocating for this be careful what you wish for. It could lead to your 100-200K per year salary being cut to well below 100K to equalize across all engineers including those in low cost areas such as China and India.

Even low cost areas like Western Europe. Tech salaries in Europe are about 1/3 of the US salaries, even for exactly the same job (in enterprises).

You mean high cost areas like Western Europe?

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

#446

Post by pc86 »

a_imho wrote: post #226
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #112

> You should expect "equal pay for equal work" at your new remote job So naive. In an ideal, utopian world? Maybe it would work this way. Maybe. In reality, your compensation is a function of your negotiating power. Some people, in fact, manage to get the same pay even when working remote, because they're "highly employable". Others don't. And let me add: I almost agree that remote work shouldn't necessarily command…

s/remote/female/g Or really, use any other marginalized group with limited negotiation power and see how your comment turns out. Only difference is remote is not protected class, but that is simply an implementation detail. Everybody argues this issue from the POV of their very own salary and it is understandable. It is fair to say you think you are at the good end of the deal and you like it there. But the moral arg…

> Only difference is remote is not protected class, but that is simply an implementation detail.

Of course it's not a protected class, and that's by design. Protected classes are things you cannot change (with the exception of religion), and thus you shouldn't be able to discriminate based on them. You wanting to live in Kansas doesn't (shouldn't) afford you some protected status giving you an artificial pay increase.

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

#447

Post by cactus2093 »

csense wrote: post #333

Say you have a startup in California and are thinking about hiring me remotely. It's completely ridiculous that you say "Okay I'll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt." If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move. As someone who actually does live in the Rust Belt, it feels like these tech c…

What about the same thought experiment with different items:

If $100k is what you're willing to pay for a Tesla Model S but it only costs $60k, it's completely ridiculous for you to walk into the store and say "Ok I would give you $100k if you charged me that much, but I'll pay you $60k instead because that's all you charge". If it makes economic sense for you to pay $100k for that car, then paying the lower amount of $60k that the store charges is just a jerk move.

Doesn't really make sense in this context. At the end of the day, salary is a lot more fuzzy than an item in a store with a set price, but it's still dictated by market forces like everything else.

> In practice I wouldn't do this. I'd simply walk away from a company that uses this offensive hiring practice on me.

That's great and that's exactly the thing that would change how the market works. If this does end up happening and enough people are in demand enough even living in low COL places, the market for tech workers will adapt and become more national. It feels like we're at a bit of a discontinuity point right now where nobody knows if labor markets for knowledge work will continue to be locally defined as they always have been, or are becoming more national. What will dictate this is people like you and me comparing our best offers, doing what's best for us, and seeing where we end up.

> it feels like these tech companies are saying "Yeah we're going to actively try to keep the wealth created by our business models concentrated in the coastal cities we like, and keep the rest of the country poor."

I guess can see that perspective, but it's really beside the point. This is the collective behavior of everyone driving the market like it always is, it won't ultimately just be up to a couple of executives to decide.

Trust me, us folks living in the coastal cities have our own pet peeves from our perspective that we can complain about all day too. We pay a lot more in federal taxes relative to the benefits we get than any other part of the country. We are nearly an order of magnitude less represented in congress and by our electoral college votes, because empty land is worth as much as people in the US. But again none of these things are really relevant to the topic at hand.

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

#448

Post by joelbluminator »

ironmagma wrote: post #175
joelbluminator wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh…

We do expect each other to be reasonably moral. It’s understood though that everyone has limits and is fundamentally flawed, so at the end of the day a few things have to be written off. Exactly how many things you write off, interestingly, contributes to your own moral standing.

I don't think we expect everyone to be reasonably moral, at least I don't live with that expectation - that's just setting yourself up for disappointment. Yes, most people don't murder or rape, but we're still quite a selfish and survivalist creature. Although we know perfectly well the amount of suffering the meat industry causes, most of us are fine with consuming meat and dairy, as long as we don't need to see the images of how the meat gets to our plate. Mostly because it tastes good; red meat is actually unhealthy. That's just one tiny example that leads me to think we're not reasonably moral. I'm not saying we can't be taught morals, but we have a long way to go till we can say what's happening is "reasonable".

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

#449

Post by aaron-santos »

csense wrote: post #333

Say you have a startup in California and are thinking about hiring me remotely. It's completely ridiculous that you say "Okay I'll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt." If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move. As someone who actually does live in the Rust Belt, it feels like these tech c…

> It's completely ridiculous that you say "Okay I'll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt."

We've been talking about this for the last 150 years. Workers are paid for their labor power, not the value they produce.

> If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.

Like laws of motion, the economic system we have naturally leads to exploiting this disparity.

> In practice I wouldn't do this. I'd simply walk away from a company that uses this offensive hiring practice on me.

Extend this to the labor pool at large. Some people have the ability to walk away from these practices while others don't. Ask yourself who has this ability and who doesn't and if this is the outcome we want.

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

#450

Post by nybble41 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #397
nybble41 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's also potentially a failure at a national long-term level as it has reduced our manufacturing capacity. That isn't a market failure. It's just a recognition that the economy is global, not national. The market doesn't optimize for the benefit of one nation against others. As for "short-term bias", the market just reflects the biases of the people making the decisions—the same as any other system. If people…

> The market's only real "failure" is that it's too democratic for the liking of certain individuals It's interesting to see this sort of rhetoric re-emerge after it took a long break after the '08 recession. Of course, the idea that the market is "too democratic" is absurd. At least, I haven't seen a democratic system where 1% of the population gets 40% of the vote. As long as "willingness to pay" is the market prox…

> At least, I haven't seen a democratic system where 1% of the population gets 40% of the vote.

In a pure voluntaryist market system everyone gets 100% of the vote (i.e. veto power) when it comes to how they use their own labor and resources. If one has acquired more wealth then one has more options available and more decisions to make, but still doesn't get any direct say in how other people use their property, no matter how rich or poor they may be. This is far more egalitarian and in keeping with the ideals espoused by most democracies than the idea that every person's freedoms and property are subject to a glorified opinion poll.

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