We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees. I'd personally be in favor of a "congestion tax" or somesuch for companies that force their employees to come in rather than work remotely. Commuting takes up energy and resources, and the congestion incurs costs on third parties (car accidents, higher gas prices, and the like).
While it's debatable whether remote works for businesses that can work remotely, it imposes costs on the rest of us, especially those who can't do their jobs over an Internet connection, and those costs should be paid by those who willingly incur them, not whoever they can push them off to.
I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work.
On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.
> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work.
I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. Large companies would only ever hire already-hyper-wealthy individuals for their main positions (since they are the only people who are ever allowed to live in dense urban places). I'm imagining employers in Seattle saying "We like this guy, but he doesn't live in Pioneer Square where our office is, so that will be a pain, we should pass on him"
Many people already have to deal with that discrimination somewhat in terms of employers only being in major cities. Having that hyper-charged down to just major cities wealthiest neighborhoods seems like an even worse situation.
Yea as someone who has a 2+ hour commute each way, such a policy would doom me to unemployment unless I was willing to take a huge loan and live closer to where the employers are. Good intentions, but bad idea.
I don't think we should take it for granted that it's prohibitively expensive to live in cities. That may be the state of metro areas in North America right now (SF, NYC, Vancouver) but historically this isn't a constant.
Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
> if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.
We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.
Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
Making city centers affordable would just require once again turning occupying / owning land into a tax liability rather than a rentier asset that grants you an effective right to tax others.
Rent certainly makes it more affordable to live somewhere until you suddenly never own your home and the rent was higher than the potential mortgage the whole time. I understand home ownership has a lot of hidden costs, but I think the rent situation is a festering cancer preventing the growth of a middle class especially in cities.
There's only so many hyper-wealthy people living close to cities. They already have jobs or have enough money that they don't need jobs. I don't think it's going to be feasible for any company to staff themselves with only hyper-wealthy people.
Also, you have to remember, in places like the bay area, you can't just pick up and move closer to work. People have enormous incentives to never move: Proposition 13 means you get 5 times lower property taxes by staying put. Not to mention the enormous imbalance between housing and jobs. All the jobs are on the peninnsula and all the housing is in the east bay. All these problems would just be amplified.
I think we're miss-stating the problem. The problem isn't that employers are forcing us to commute long distances with poor company placement. The problem is, we as employees don't have enough power to choose/demand where we want to work. There's simply too much labor supply and too little demand. So, if a worker demands to work remotely, the company can just say: we'll fire this guy and hire one of the countless others willing to commute 2 hours or more.
Just to prove my point: Here in the bay area, companies still place themselves on the penninsula where there's a 4 to 1 ratio of jobs to residential places to live. By that math, they shouldn't be able to hire anyone. And yet, they're having absolutely no problem filling positions, because workers are extremely desperate for money. So desperate, they're willing commute 2 hours or pay 60% of their paycheck to live closer. These are all symptoms of labor oversupply and too little labor demand.
In the end, setting aside the distortions caused by minimum wage laws, companies pay for the value they receive from their employees. How you want to apportion that value (hours, widgets, hours [including commuting hours], flexible work arrangements, paid time off, company holidays, etc) doesn't matter much.
As an employer, I'm indifferent between paying someone $50/hour for an 8-hour work day, or $40/hr for an 8-hour workday plus 2 hours of paid commuting.
But you would also be incentivized to locate your office in a more commutable location. In some cases, a slightly higher rent would even make sense to offset the costs of paying people to commute.
Maybe. (In fact, we already care quite a bit about commuting time and ease because we want to retain our developers in a very competitive employment market.)
I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.
> So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.
You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office.
It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.
Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..
In the bay area the morning crush is anywhere between 6:45 and 11:45. I've sometimes tried the "man traffic looks really bad right now and I don't have any meetings in the morning, I'll wait until later to start my commute" and then check again at 10:30 and it's the same _or worse_.
I don't have any particular evidence that this is actually true, instead of just noticing patterns in randomness, but something that feels like it works more often than chance is commuting right after 09:00 or 10:00, on the theory that a significant number of commuters have deadlines on the hour, so traffic might be less immediately after the deadline. It's not completely reliable, so I'm skeptical that it's real, but it also makes a good enough excuse to get me on the road earlier than I would otherwise, so that's nice.
That's what I do. I commute to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. I get into the office at 6:30AM every day and leave by 2:30PM. It's still not a lovely commute---maybe 40 to 50 minutes each way---but it's half the time if I were forced to work 9-5. I pay for this with sleep. It's hard for me to get to sleep before 10PM. :-)
I tried that one job. Invariably managers would schedule meetings at 3:00, or someone would come to my desk at 2:15 with a task that just had to be finished that day.
Regarding the second point: Employees always have an incentive to try to stretch out their tasks, so employers already know how to minimize that behavior. If employers paid for commuting, commuting would be managed like other tasks.
It's close enough over large groups of people. On average you're going to make more money doing the same thing in SF, for example, than you would in the East Bay.
In addition to the other negatives, there is also personal life considerations. Most people have a significant other who they want to live with long term, who also works. This throws a bunch of complications into the picture that I can't quite figure out.
>We commute because businesses can push off the cost of commuting to their employees.
This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages.
If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.
It is not an externality, as an externality is strictly a cost that is borne primarily by parties outside of the transaction. The cost of a commute is external to the Company, but the labor market is two sided (employee/company) and the costs are therefore priced into the transaction appropriately.
This is true for the effect of the worker commuting on himself but the company does not have to pay any cost premium for the effect of the worker commuting on other people (and neither does the worker). That part (more traffic) is the externality.
How is it that the business is pushing the costs off?
If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.
It's an unnecessary cost though. It's like if I had a choice to teleport the bananas over the phone, but the buyer insisted that I deliver them by hand. I'd charge that awkward banana-buyer more.
If a workplace needs bananas then they have to pay for shipping to get it into the office. Labor is the only workplace input that walks in the door for free.
I think a fairer deal would be if commute time counted against the typical 8 hours of work. That way everybody's interests would align around having short commute times.
I think most workers factor in the commute when they are looking for and choosing a job (I know I do). Now, we can argue that workers undervalue the time and money they spend commuting, but it is still not 'free' for the employer.
Also, not all of the commute cost is the fault of the employer. For example, my commute is a lot shorter than many of my coworkers, because I place more importance on a short commute than a cheaper, bigger house further away. My coworkers value having a bigger house more, so they live where the housing is cheaper but the commute longer.
How would your price this in? Would the people who commute further get to work shorter hours, just because I chose to sacrifice for a closer commute?
Who ultimately pays for this congestion tax? The employees in the form of lower salaries, the customers in the form of higher prices and the shareholders in the form of lower profits.
I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit.
That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc.
Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.
Everybody's already paying the congestion tax. They just pay in time, health, and lost productivity. But since it's a negative externality, the incentive to fix it is blunted.
If a congestion tax worked, the overall burden would go down, because businesses would work harder to locate offices near where employees are (or want to be). And they'd also likely get more active in things like housing and transit policy, because it would be to their direct financial benefit to make sure that development was more balanced.
You... prefer the version that makes everyone pay for telecommuters, rather than making only those who directly interact with non-telecommuter companies pay, and which is more open to being gamed/scammed? Why?
I commute because I love driving (even in a little traffic), I'm not disciplined enough to work from home (and never will be - know thyself), and I like the social aspect of the office (where I am immeasurably more productive). It's a win-win-win for me. I don't even consider telecommuting when looking for work.
Why don't you just find a new job if you aren't happy with your company's employment conditions? Why resort to blanket government intervention instead of just addressing your concerns on an individual level?
Can they though? Isn't part of your contract with your employer how difficult it is to get there? I wouldn't take an hour driving commute for my job now, but if you added 30k to my salary? I'd consider it.
Something has to happen--my commute is only 11 miles but it often takes 40 minutes because of a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down).
My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture.
As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so.
I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.
I'm on the job market now and the most feedback I get are from jobs that would be 45 min - 1 hr minimum (in the same city). I've done it before, it's terrible for my health and mental state.
Moving closer isn't an option because it's even more expensive than the already expensive area I live in now and the salaries won't compensate to offset that.
>a stupid bridge that has had every social engineering plot applied to it to no avail (HOV lanes with pay-to-use transponders being the latest fashion and cops to enforce the rules slowing everyone else down).
Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct.
It would be a heck of a lot more efficient than combining a bunch of disincentives that affect the lower classes.
> Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct.
Why does nobody ever try free public transportation? Paying the poor brings a lot of practical issues, but at a minimum you can make them not pay for taking the long route.
And yet, here we are, paying it through the nose by losing time in transit, and contemplating wether it would be a moral thing to pay poor people into taking a longer route.
While it's debatable whether remote works for businesses that can work remotely, it imposes costs on the rest of us, especially those who can't do their jobs over an Internet connection, and those costs should be paid by those who willingly incur them, not whoever they can push them off to.