How would you compensate employees for commuting to work?
Suppose there are two employees: Alice and Bob, who do the same job at the same factory. Alice has a 10 minute (20RT) commute, Bob commutes 35 minutes(70RT).
If you’re the owner of the factory, would you compensate them for their commutes? How would you do it?
No, the one with the longer commute should be taxed extra to account for all the damage caused to the environment, increased traffic, road wear and tear, etc.
Commuting should never be encouraged. Live where you work.
If I am travelling to a location purely to do my job at that location, then travelling to that location is part of my job. I must be reasonably compensated for it either as part of my salary or as an extra (tax adjusted) payment.
Switch the pronouns and such to apply for Bob and Alice both.
Option 1) % of hourly pay rate, capped at an two hours for a total round trip (but flexible) + a stipend depending on mode of transportation. Could try to get receipts from workers and have a purser issue cash/credit on their next paycheck or issue re loadable debit cards that get filled at regular intervals. (So a card for paid public transit and fuel for combustion vehicles) If we’re working in a place that taxes employee wages, the more taxes the employer can carry the better on the workers.
Option 2) Everybody gets a debit card and a list of approved places/items to be purchased for the purposes of “commuting to work compensation”. Workers could be expected to keep as many receipts as possible to turn in weekly just to verify stuff.
Option 3) Some subcommittee tracks worker commute times and how they commute and every quarter or something a stipend is paid in a lump sum like a bonus or it is used to give a paycheck by paycheck payout.
Easiest idea would be like JohanSkullcrusher said, full hourly pay rate the second I get into my car to start driving. Though workers would wind up paying more in income taxes and there’d probably be some issues with workers getting different compensation, like somebody walking 10 minutes to work and somebody driving 1 hour to get to work are going to have significantly different income levels at the end of the year.
Anything short of my commuting time being considered part of my working hours is a non-starter for me. I value the time I gain by not commuting a lot more than most employers do. If my day starts the moment I close my front door, then we can start talking about additional concessions.
My employer gives us a commuting payment based on the distance from home to work (paid per km) on days we go to the office. We get an additional €60 a month to cover our working from home costs.
If it were me I’d just get an average commute, provide a stipend of gas or transport costs within your city, e.g. 15km distance, or a monthly pass for local area transit. If I’d want to relocate someone I may offer a signing bonus to help with moving and settling costs.
It’s a reasonable expectation that if your job is at a workplace in Toronto, being within city limits is not an unreasonable expectation.
Offering to finance all or part of the tickets is a good option IMO. My company offers the German “job ticket” or whatever it was called again to a percentage.
First: a company should pay at a minimum a wage that can afford housing nearby (probably within 15 minutes’ drive). The company should pay everyone for work hours + that round trip nearby commute time
If the company is paying that wage, then employees who live farther away are making a free choice to do so. They still get that round trip nearby commute time paid, but time beyond that is not paid. Or paid at some diminishing rate.
Companies should recognize a worker’s time list for the company’s benefit. But there has to be a balance because of the temptation to game the system.
Intentionally living farther away from your job doesn’t sound like such an appealing thing though because you are still wasting however much of your day having to drive to work. Like sure you get paid more but the pay is hardly ever worth more than the extra free time.
Let’s make generalizations to answer the bigger problem here.
Most jobs that people are talking about are in cities.
Some people choose to not live right in the middle of a city for various reasons, but still want that job. They may live in a nearby community, the edge of the city, a county or two over, etc.
Predatory companies like Amazon resolve this by telling someone like Ryan homes to build a few 300 house communities right next to their new warehouse, resolving the issue and making their own non-city town. Normal companies do not have this ability.
There has to be a balance.
Businesses need to not be involved in commute repayment. They should instead invest into their local communities to make them more desirable to live in.
“choose” is doing a lot of work there. Have you priced housing lately? The real “choice” I see is that companies “choose” their location such that their employees can’t afford to live nearby on the wages they’re earning, or the companies “choose” to pay employees to little in wages to afford to live nearby.
You could also say the employees choose to work for the company that’s not paying them enough. Of course they have constraints in how many jobs there are and how many other job seekers exist and which jobs they are qualified for… but then the problem complexity explodes to “how do we build a fair society” very quickly.
although it is also true that near areas with lots of jobs rents will be higher and this is a case where the bourgeoise is actually relatively innocent and landlords are to blame instead. This is to a far lesser extent than it is for the proletariat an issue for the bourgeoise as it makes hiring more difficult to hire and takes money out of the economy that would likely otherwise be spent on commodities
It’s none of the company’s business how an employee gets to work. It’s just not.
The company should compensate the employee fairly or well for the COL in the area the job is. That’s it. It’s not their job to worry about how the employee gets to work.
Other than allowing/encouraging WFH where it makes sense the company shouldn’t try to tell the employees how to live.
I disagree. If a company chooses to NOT be in a huge city, yes. But if they are in a city just to flex with the address, and basically noone actually lives there (which is a very big thing here), then yes it is their responsibility
Then they can pay their employees more for the trouble as a whole. Which is what generally already happens for employers in high cost of living areas anyway.
The easiest two ways are to either pay per mile, or just add the round trip time to whatever their pay is. There might be some small complaints and attempts to abuse. But the complaining is easy to deal with and I think the abuse would be small and could be dealt with in similar ways as other time theft is dealt with.
In the U.S., employers can subsidize bus passes, van pools, and bicycling to work (I guess provide bikes?) as a tax-free benefit. I’d certainly offer that.
I would not provide more $ to the employee who took a job further from home, unless I was doing on-site jobs on various job sites, work that moved around. Events, construction, etc. My employer pays for airfare or mileage for event work, that is not taxable to the employees.
Even when I did temp work I wouldn’t take jobs far from my house, or any that were not one bus away, even though I have a car because cars break sometimes.
I DO think of commute time in a car as unpaid work but manage that in my life by working near home, or living near work.
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