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.
You’re out of your mind if you think a $300k salary for every working citizen is feasible. Paying that out would require $53 trillion, which is more than our GDP.
That’s the thing though, the number doesn’t matter.
We have people starving and then we have people traveling to the other side of the planet to throw a wedding that could feed millions of people.
Fuck a number, fuck money, eat the rich then we can all eat and live wherever we want.
Sometimes I think about trying to buy a tiny home or a single wide, and then 5 seconds later, I realize that its just not going to fucking happen. That’s an insane thought. If we don’t start hitting the streets soon, we’re all going to lose.
$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.
Less congestion for people that do need to travel.
Less pollution.
More free time.
Cheaper housing because we won’t all need to be clustered in the places with decent paying jobs.
But no, fuck it all because the mega rich might have to make do with very slightly less.
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
I wonder if this would make it harder for people to find jobs. I imagine companies would be less inclined to hire people an hour away if they had to pay for it.
Or they might allow more work from home if it means saving on those commutes.
That would be good except that you could literally get a job far away for “was” money, or you would disadvantage people living farther away from jobs (cities)
There are people who take Work from Home jobs in high CoL areas and then move to low CoL places to pocket the difference, so that’s not too far off from what already happens.
Plus, on the other side, incentivizing companies to hire locally could cause companies to be selective in their location to maximize the convenience of commuting from multiple areas for reduced overhead, or increase the desire for increased urban density and lessen suburban sprawl, which is literally choking the life out of places in infrastructure costs alone. Garbage and water services for the wealthy suburbs is subsidized from the taxes of poor people’s apartment buildings.
Of course, we all know that what would really happen is that we’d see the return of company towns where you sleep in the same bed as 2 other guys on 8 hour shifts so the bed has 100% occupancy 24 hours a day.
it’s unpaid labor either way, it’s a bit arbitrary to say owning a car and commuting for a job isn’t time and money spent for the employer in your capacity as an employee
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve done 30000km in a year by commuting.
I mean… It can be. You just have to ask for a raise. That is what I do. If I get a job that is further away, I expect to be paid more. One of the reasons I’m sticking with my current job even though the pay is not great, is that I’m less than 10 minutes away from home. I even get to come home for lunch.
You wouldn’t say that when a plumber or any physical trade suddenly charge you triple for commute.
Not that i mind, really, would be sweet if us tradesman get a salary/commission hike.
Don’t know about household plumbers, but in a B2B setting you totally do charge for mobilization. Usually, the site is like 500-2000 km away from the specialist you happen to need today. Those service engineers need to travel everywhere in the EMEA region anyway, so a distance like that is just another Thursday for them.
Not trying to be a capitalist shill or anything. But in that case, wouldn’t need for a more local plumber spring up? Supply and demand eventually meeting the mentality of someone in the local community to say, “Well being a plumber wasn’t my first choice but the money makes it hard to ignore.” or the demand being so great that a plumber in a more saturated supply area decides its too good of an opportunity to not move.
The issue now would be there isn’t possible to have plumbers in all corner of the city/town, especially when some place the rent is so high it’s not gonna worth it. Commute is still gonna be around 40min to 60min round trip, more in rural area. Not to mention people also tend to have their trusted or recommended tradesman for the job, as it’s a skilled profession, everyone gonna have different level of skill, ware, price, and attitude toward customer, which mean the trusted one might be further away than the unknown company closer to you.
Tradesman that work on site already factor in commute into the pricing anyway, but in no way that commute is 3 times of anything. My counter argument to OP is really just that 3 times is stupidly high, while agreeing that people should be compensated for the time spend commuting, maybe with a bit higher in salary per day they spend in workplace.
Dont you get charged a “callout fee” when you call a tradesman? thats basically what that is
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)
