An hour spent commuting is 1/16th of your daily life, and that hour is by far the biggest risk to your life every day. You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.
When they started pushing for $15 federal minimum, it should have been $50.
Today, it should be about $150.
At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.
People don’t realize how insanely bad it’s been getting.
I disagree that we should be paid triple to travel. We should just be paid appropriately. That’s all.
Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I’m not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask…
At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.
Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account… Do you really expect that housing prices would just… Stay the same?
I’m also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year’s worth of wages?
Agreed. My wife and I are doing pretty well and we don’t even make anywhere near $150/hr combined. Maybe in the Bay and NYC that wage would make sense but not most places. Making that the minimum wage would just cause a ton of inflation and put most people back at square one.
Maybe not one year, but it looks like a median home in the US in 1965 cost around 6 years of a median income.
In the 1854 book Walden by Thoreau, he gives a pessimistic account of how long it would take to afford a property in a town, that is still less than today:
An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if he is not encumbered with a family- estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less
Although he goes on to describe building his own more remote cabin for $28.
Something is very, very wrong with incomes and housing prices currently that wasn’t as bad a problem in the past.
$150 per hour? I’m in salaried software engineering and barely making a third of that after a promotion.
If what you propose happens, all the prices of everything would skyrocket… It seems good on paper, but it ignores all the greed of capitalism…
For better or worse, (the latter for rich folks…) there “needs” to be tiers of incomes (in Capitalism). Bumping the minimum just bumps the prices. We’ve already experience it with minimum wage bumps in the US. We don’t have an actual solution that works at the moment in the US because minimum wage increases automatically lead to greedier CEOs.
I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said but also we haven’t had any federal minimum wage bumps in a decade and a half. States that follow federal minimum wage haven’t exactly kept their cost of living frozen.
I have always felt that you should be paid for travel time for a job. If it takes 30 mins to drive to work then the company should be paying you that time.
Look at how many bosses/CEOs bill their daily travel expenses to the company
There is a study that showed workers don’t mind commuting so long as the route is full of greenery and nature. That explains a lot because in my hometown, I was happy enough to commute in public transport and people are nice enough that you can chat with them. Then I moved to a bigger city, which is a concrete jungle. I hate the commute. And mind you, the public transport in my home town is about ten to twenty minutes more depending on the traffic, but I didn’t mind for some reason. Then, after moving to a bigger city, travelling only for one hour feels like a long trek.
Something like 4 minutes of my 25 minute commute is through trees, and it still makes a big difference. I think you’re on to something.
I used to have a drive to work, and it suckkkkkkkkkked. I moved, and can now cycle to work or take a nice train. I suddenly do not mind my 30 minute commute at all. I look forward to my bike ride most of the time, and I love the feeling after having done it.
I take a bus and then walk … half hour or so on the bus and half hour or so of walking. If I drive it’s like 35-45 minutes?
However, I’m always more tired when I arrive there. Also, I’m not a fan of finding parking and stuff around the office.
Absolutely. I’ve been working from home for ~3 years and I’ll never go back. I have so much more time for myself (and also, no one is annoying me with smalltalk or stupid questions).
Agreed.
I’m lucky in several respects, being on a public transit line and only 10 minutes from work, but we have a guy on my team who drives, in his own car, 90 miles each way for our one day a week in the office. It’s dumb.
You should be getting triple pay to ameliorate the hazard risk it represents.
That’s something a union can help with. Most compensation above poverty wages has been won by unions at one point or another. Most of them a long ago and we’ve been regressing for a few decades.
The implication of this is that if that job can’t be done from home, it’s not theft. So the guy making pretty decent money in an office job that could be done at home should get compensated for their commute, but the sandwich artist making far less should not because that can’t be done at home?
And before we start saying that everyone should have their commute compensated, that has a lot of baggage to it too. I live in the suburbs. I chose to live there knowing there was a trade-off between having more house for the money, but also spending more time in my car to get anywhere. If I were searching for a job, I wouldn’t want to be passed over for it because of the longer commute time I was expecting to have from my own choice in where to live. And let’s say I decided to move 3 hours away to be closer to my in-laws or something. But don’t worry boss, I’ll keep working here! I just won’t be in the office for more than 2 hours a day unless you want to pay me overtime. That’s… A little ridiculous.
Plus unnecessarily damaging the environment which is already in critical condition
I’m lucky enough o be able to take the bus to work, plus they give me a free transit card.
Accepting an onsite job, regardless of whether it can be performed at home or not, places the responsibility on you to be able to commute there, and it wouldn’t be fair to compensate only office workers for their commute time when other workers face the same risks while traveling. I’d rather have reliable public transportation and fair salaries relative to costs of living.
My employer gives everyone an annual public transport ticket for commuting.
Taking into account expenses, and no need to financially budget for travel and stress about it, this is a fairly low cost way to satisfy your employees. Is the work not possibly WFH or employer would rather have people in office?
It’s in Germany, people are really weird about WFH. Most people were forced back into the office, even software developers.
Can you use that for non-work travel too?
Yes. The ticket is valid on most public transport at all times.
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I currently travel 2 hours to and from work, making my 9 to 5 a 7 to 7. I hate it so much lmao
When I was renting (most of my life), I would find an apartment that was close to my job. I hated commuting with a furious passion.
I would kill for 1/16th. I’m at 1/8th trying not to go into the office more than three times a week.
I wouldn’t kill for 1/16th it wouldn’t make a difference to these people. Maybe a bomb threat.
Don’t you include commute in the workday? If you have 30 min to office (1h in total), and have a 7h workday, then you only need to be in office for 6 hours. And 1h of them is probably lunch?
If company allows work from home, then they will probably maximise the number of “work” hours, as you don’t have a commute and lunch is probably quicker.
(This is how it should be, but yes I’m joking)
.(This is how it should be, but yes I’m joking)
You had me going there.
I’ve done 30000km in a year by commuting.
I just don’t understand why developers don’t jump on the opprtunity to build commercial offices outside of the main downtown areas, closer to where people live, this will eliminate the long and taxing commute that everyone hates and get people back in office like they want, is there some tax or zoning reason why all the office space is located downtown in the US, with hybrid work these days it would be so much better if I could just go to some co-working space close to my home
Office parks in the middle of nowhere suck. You’re never going to be close to everyone, employees can’t walk somewhere for a change of scenery or to take a break, and being away from downtown means public transit is less likely to reach the area.
I’m all for letting people pick a coworking space if they want, but making people commute to the suburbs is a different kind of hell.
The lack of scenery and being in the middle of nowhere with poor public transportation options is a failure of suburban design caused by segregation of commercial and residential areas and too much dependency on personal cars. I’ve never liked those rows up rows of identical single family homes, they feel empty and soulless, which is why I prefer staying on the outer neighborhoods of downtown so there’s plenty of walkable places and public transportation options
Rich fucks wanting skyline views from their desk?
