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California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

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Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#371

Post by pixl97 »

changoplatanero wrote: post #168
TrackerFF wrote: post #61

Some quick napkin math: Say you work 100% remote, 8 hours a day. That's 2080 work hours a year, out of 8760 hours. That means you need to be connected to internet, have electricity, etc. 23.74% of the time - let's round that up to 24% Say a worker pays $600 / year for internet, $2400 for electricity / year, and - dunno - $1500 for your cellphone / year. So that's $4500 / year, and your employer must cover approximate…

I don’t understand why people shouldn’t be allowed to enter into any sort of employment contract that they wish. As long as both parties are well informed then they should be free to agree on what expenses will be covered and what won’t

"Libertarian doesn't understand how democracy works"

It doesn't matter if both parties are informed, the balance of power is what matters. It doesn't matter how well informed you are if your other option is starvation.

Everyone, and I mean everyone I've ever met that makes this argument is coming from a position of power themselves. They some rare ability in a labor constrained market and want to generalized their situation to everyone without realizing the massive abuses that already occurred that mandated these rules in the first place.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#372

Post by pixl97 »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #343
thehappypm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you opposed to a minimum wage?

Yes, it is immoral. You are taking away someone’s freedom to willingly enter into a contract. Plenty of successful societies do not have a minimum wage.

Do those same societies have strong social safety nets or otherwise public, low cost means of education and healthcare. Because if so, that's a really huge difference.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#373

Post by dragonwriter »

bmj wrote: post #132
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #99

Many young people or those cheering for employee/consumer rights do not seem to understand that this does more net harm than good. For small businesses and startups, this can amount to millions of dollars of additional expenses. Like any economically rational entity, your employer is going to respond by reducing headcount, not hiring in CA anymore, cutting costs in your annual raises, or some combination of the above…

Fully remote work has always benefited the employer more than the employee, at least financially. Before the pandemic closed my employer's local office space (we were all told just to work from home), part of the employer's budget for each employee included infrastructure costs (office space, furniture, internet access, maybe food, beverages, etc). My salary did not change when I became fully remote, so the company r…

> Fully remote work has always benefited the employer more than the employee

All work in a roughly capitalist system does, except by temporary accident, that's sort of a defining feature.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#374

Post by standardUser »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #99

Many young people or those cheering for employee/consumer rights do not seem to understand that this does more net harm than good. For small businesses and startups, this can amount to millions of dollars of additional expenses. Like any economically rational entity, your employer is going to respond by reducing headcount, not hiring in CA anymore, cutting costs in your annual raises, or some combination of the above…

Explain to me how a small business can spend millions of dollars in a single year complying with this law.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#375

Post by mempko »

glimshe wrote: post #258
mempko wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally one of the purposes of the tax system. It's to encourage and discourage behavior.

That's literally NOT the purpose of the tax system. We tax people to pay for government expenses. Encouraging/discouraging behavior through taxes is very popular in the US, but not nearly as much in most other countries.

It depends on the level of government and their sovereignty. If the government controls it's own currency, the purpose of taxes is not to pay for expenses, but to provision the government, create a demand for that currency, and create markets. Sovereign governments are in a perpetual state of deficit on purpose.

Governments in the Eurozone are not Sovereign because they don't have control over the currency and must use taxes to pay government expenses.

US states and cities also must use taxes to pay for government expenses.

So the real answer is complex, it depends on whether you are a sovereign government or not.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#376

Post by foxyv »

NeoTar wrote: post #79

Can I make my periodic reminder to US-Americans that two-letter state abbreviations are not universally recognized, and please to use full state names where possible. The case of California / CA is especially bad, since this is the ISO-code for Canada, so the article title is unnecessarily ambiguous.

I used to work for UPS at their Ontario California air hub as a sorter. We would constantly get packages for Ontario Canada. UPS must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year shipping packages to Ontario Canada via California.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#377

Post by shortcake27 »

rat9988 wrote: post #354
xur17 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A computer uses 150kWh/year @ $0.42/kWh that is $75/year. Certainly internet is possible at $60/month so $720/year. Say you have a generous $500/5 years for equipment plan and you are still below $1,000/year/employee. So California is adding a bunch of administrative expenses for something that will net out to a few thousand dollars max per employee. Workers that have to go the office easily spend more than this on…

"something that will net out to a few thousand dollars max per employee" This is quite significant.

Average Cali salary is 73k. Assume an employee stays for 2 years (I just made this number up, I have no idea what the average retention for a remote worker is, but it’s probably more). It would barely represent 1% of total renumeration for the employee. “Significant” is not a word I’d use to describe a 1-2% cost to an employer.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#378

Post by civilitty »

twelve40 wrote: post #288
civilitty wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Californian who has lived here for a quarter century and has never threatened to leave, I’m glad the state doesn’t cater to startups who can’t afford an extra 5% for home office expenses for their remote workers. They have zero loyalty to the state and if all employees are remote there’s little benefit keeping the corp in CA. Everyone has to register to do business here and the FTB will get the bulk of its cut a…

confused. If all of this is about remote workers, how are they taking up "the space" here? aren't most of them in the lower COL areas freeing up the space while the company pays the CA taxes?

My rant is directed at the entrepreneurs and companies who scoff at paying their fair share to employees and the state while demanding all the benefits of living and operating in the great state of California. Getting these politically powerful NIMBYs out of the state would do a disproportionate amount of good.

The reality is that California is so economically powerful that any corporation that leaves is almost certainly going to have to register as a foreign business and pay the franchise tax on all revenue earned in California anyway (the minimum cutoff is $500k or 25% of total revenue, whichever is lowest). The employees who stay in California are still going to pay income tax which makes up the bulk of state revenues. Everyone is still going to be paying sales tax on goods purchased from California vendors, the largest source after income tax.

Corporate taxes contribute less than 15% of California's budget so it's a reverse catch 22: either they're so small that the threats to leave are empty (DO IT!), or they're so big that they can't afford not to pay California taxes regardless of where they are. Like I said, either way the FTB will get the bulk of its cut.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#379

Post by turquoisevar »

nxm wrote: post #364
fergie wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like any economically rational entity, your employer is going to respond by… A weak argument that can be made about any general improvement to worker pay snd conditions. Its clear that societies that encourage workers rights have the strongest economies.

Where is that true? France has very strong workers rights, and its GDP growth, for example, is significantly worse than that of the US.

GDP is a poor measure of a country’s prosperity or standard of living.

Based on GDP numbers Italy is barely ahead of Mississippi, even though spending 10 minutes in both will make it readily apparent that one is miles ahead in terms of prosperity than the other.

Re: California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses

#380

Post by jstarfish »

jandrese wrote: post #279
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #99

Many young people or those cheering for employee/consumer rights do not seem to understand that this does more net harm than good. For small businesses and startups, this can amount to millions of dollars of additional expenses. Like any economically rational entity, your employer is going to respond by reducing headcount, not hiring in CA anymore, cutting costs in your annual raises, or some combination of the above…

> your employer is going to respond by reducing headcount If they have enough slack to reduce headcount they're going to do it anyway. Companies strive to hire enough people to get the job done and no more. They may not always get it right, but minor changes to expenses aren't going to affect headcount unless the company was already overstaffed and looking for an excuse to cut employees. This is the same mistaken thi…

> This is the same mistaken thinking you see from people who oppose minimum wage increases. The McDonalds down the street isn't going to cut staff because the wages went up, they need those staff to serve customers.

Shenanigans. You've never worked in retail. Even if you come back claiming otherwise, I'm still going to accuse you of lying about it because you could only be more out of touch with reality if you claimed to be the ghost of Sam Walton himself.

"Necessary" staff does gets cut and the remaining employees are expected to pick up the slack. The alternative course is shaving hours off of the schedule for all employees. Sometimes they go both routes.

One way or another, the retailer will not bear that cost of increased wages. It gets suffered first by employees through reduced hours, then by customers in a degraded service experience.

You offer economic theory. I'm telling you from bitter experience what actually happens.

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