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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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It seems silly to incentivise long commutes.
Why pay someone that drives an hour each way more than someone that cycles to work in twenty minutes?
In that example, based on a wage of £20ph, the driver would be earning £6,666 per year more than the cyclist, that's nearly an additional £300,000 over a 45 year career.. You'd be an absolute idiot to not sell your house and move as far away from your work as reasonably possible.
People always bring up this objection, but it's extremely solvable: just pay employees for their travel respective to the median commute time for that area. Sure, people who live close get a little bonus and people who live far away get slightly less; but it removes all impetus to game the system and helps people who need it.
Germany kind of does that... When you file your taxes, you claim the "Pendlerpauschale", which is, roughly translated, the commute lump sum. For the first 20 kilometres between home and work, people get 30 cents per km, any km after that gives you 38 cents.
It kind of works in the sense that the money you spend to get to work is more or less evened out. It is also paid regardless of your means of transport, so cheaper means (such as bicycles or trams) are incentivised by potentially making you some money in return. However, this is still far from an hourly wage... We're talking about a few hundred euros, maybe a few thousand per year if you have a long commute.
If you used the median time and would force employers to pay a wage I really don't get how you would either prevent people to move further away (if you have worker protection laws) or people being fired for living too far away (if you live in the USA). This would also make it far more profitable for higher incomes to commute, which seems kind of counter-intuitive as they are probably the ones who need it the least and who would be able to just move to a new home if they wanted to.
But you don't get paid the "Pendlerpauschale". You can only deduct it from your taxes.
Let's just hope that if you travel eighty kilometres to work you'll earn enough for this distinction to no longer be relevant?
That would mean paying a marginal tax rate of 100%. The maximum marginal tax in germany is 45%, if you make more than €277000 per year.
If you pay everyone the same "travel allowance" then that's just part of everyone's total compensation and compensation will be reduced somewhere else. There's no magic money fountain at a business. An employee's compensation is an employee's compensation. Simply declaring that "this portion of your pay is a travel allowance" is absolutely meaningless.
A company is not going to pay everyone more money just to help those who live far away who "need it".
Well there sometimes is a magic money fountain. Like when the minimum wage goes up the money fountain just pays people more money that apparently wasn’t there before. Or when people ask for a raise and their boss tells them no so they leave and have to pay a new hire 140% of the original employee. The trick is to make the money fountain think you’re not going to work anymore because it’s only on a trickle. As soon as you stop working it remembers where all the money is. Magic
Economists like to pretend that currency is entirely rational, real, finite, and concrete, but it's really not. That fiction only holds together as long as the bulk of people are willing to believe it.
Besides, these laws would never be two lines long like are written here. They would have addenda and provisions and such, preventing businesses from discriminating against employees based upon commute length, giving an upper limit, preventing a decrease in compensation to accommodate the commute benefit, and so forth.
And in the end would it turn out to be less than worthwhile? Maybe. But current remuneration in Western culture emphatically isn't working. We need either one big change or lots of little changes, and this would fall in the latter category.
What kind of stupid question is that? Just walk two hours instead of cycling twenty minutes! Duh!
Stupid ideas get stupid questions!
Why mention cycling?
In that case it would be "drive one hour or cycle 4"
Do you mean to suggest the company should hire folks who live closer, period? That is more logical
The operative task is minimize commute.
In most cases a car would be the fastest commute, even if you live close. (Assuming a non hyper dense urban environment)
In my country, cycling is incentivized. I get paid for cycling to work.
Besides that, commute time isn't that much different by bike than by car in my case.
All well and fine, but they compared apples to oranges, by moving variables
I was comparing two different, but very reasonable scenarios where two employees pay would be hugely different for a very silly reason. It's not apples and oranges.
An actual comparison was simple.
"Imagine one employee lives an hour away, and one lives 20 minutes away"
You're arguing about semantics, it doesn't change the point that I was trying to make.
That or go remote if there's no productive reason why they need to be in the office and then just don't have to pay for a non-existent commute
It's actually kinda genius from the perspective of getting unneeded commuters off the road, because like hell are those middle managers willing to pay commute time just to be able to more effectively ride your shoulder at the office
For me it is:
You seem to assume that I was implying that the two people in the scenario live an equal distance from the work place.
My scenario implies that the cyclist might live less than ten miles from work and that the driver lives a multiple of that away and ridicules the idea of financially rewarding someone for living further away from the workplace in terms of distance, time and carbon footprint.
I didn't assume anything I took issue with moving variables from the outset.
Differing the range of travel in a question about the duration of travel is insanity. Then layering on a change of the mode of travel too....
Why not just pay the price of gas plus maintenance costs then? But I would be for the same wage for commutes because that's time that the individuals don't get back in their life.
Why not just live near your work place and save money and time yourself instead of making it your employers problem that you have a long commute.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the appeal of getting paid more for any reason. I just don't think that it's going to go down well in a workplace where some people would be getting paid substantially more for no other reason than they've chosen a job that's far from where they live.
It's not getting paid more it's the employer funding the employees' commutes.
I mean, that is kind of what a paycheck is for. . .
Or you could just go remote if you can
I don't want to think about the person that had the option to go remote and yet still chose to commute every day instead.
Extroverts, shudders
You would also account the gas and maintenance of the car that needs to drive that much. Also, now you are doing "overtime" every day. Thanks no thanks.