The only reason I own a car is to get to work. Otherwise I’d use public transport and delivery services all the time.
Therefore, 90% of the time I use my car is in service of my job. Getting to the office and coming home from the office. Therefore my commute is entirely based on the fact that I’m going to or from work. Otherwise I wouldn’t be using the car, sitting in traffic.
So yeah, it’s 100% ‘on the clock’ time, even if they want to somehow argue it isn’t. Even if I wanted a car for things like grocery shopping or getting elsewhere in the city, the time spent in traffic going to or from work, and the wear and tear on the vehicle during that time is because of my job. Therefore my job should pay for my time and the vehicle maintenance. Period.
I’m not paid well at my current job but it’s also close and I can walk/bike.
I’m looking at jobs that pay me a lot more and it’s not worth it since I have to buy, license, and maintain a car then on top of that I’m driving into work, which blows.
When they forced me back into the office I didn’t ask permission, I’m just subtracting the hours I commute from my workday. Nobody I work with is in the office I go to so I just poke the mouse every 15min and tether my personal laptop to my phone for the first couple of hours while I decompress from the hour commute. Nobody ever comes by my cube, I’m just in a depressing beige box all day hating the company that’s making me be there.
I used to like my job and go out of my way to find and solve problems. Sometimes I’d work at night if there was something interesting I’d found. Now I’m never ever online after I get home and I’m doing enough to not get fired.
I want to make a ‘give my back my god damn stapler or I’ll burn the building down’ joke, but it’s a highrise and I don’t want to be on some FBI list or something.
Also, I remember paying for travel time when we needed a technician to come to our house and service something. So there is already precedent that traveling for work counts as work in itself. Hopefully that actually went to the tech and not their boss.
I like working in the office, but I hate having to spend an unpaid amount of time commutinh to work. If I could get paid travel time I’d be a very happy man.
Yeah, this is it. While I prefer WFH, I don’t mind working in the office, but I don’t want to spend more time driving to and from, that’s just more lost free time.
My company actually closed the office where I worked because we all went 100% remote and they never forced the issue. It wouldn’t have helped their case that we have dozens of other employees all over the country not linked to either of the company’s offices.
Second: Workers aren’t grasping the managerial challenges of leading a remote workforce.
I can grasp it pretty well: Shitty managers can't tell if someone's working without watching them, so they're panicking. Managers who can measure their teams output more accurately than asses-in-chairs aren't having a problem.
As the experts have maintained for years, a flexible hybrid schedule is almost always the proper approach.
The proper approach to have people sitting in an office on a Zoom call, maybe. I've never seen hybrid be as effective as either fully remote or fully on premises.
Spot on. I’m a people manager and I set my expectations on productivity early and give them the freedom to make their own choices as to how and where they spend their time. At the end of the day, if they didn’t get the work done, they’re held accountable for it. Wish my own boss understood this.
Well…It wasn’t part of my work day, but I came on as a remote employee. Now that they are telling me that I need to come in 3 days a week with no comp increase, you can bet your butt that I will be counting that commute as part of my work day.
My company is going to be pushing for three days a week in the office soon. I find it suspicious that so many other components have landed on three days as the magic number. They clearly get together and plan this shit behind our backs.
When I worked in Belgium not only did they pay for your transit costs, they even paid for your car, phone, and lunch. Granted the car and phone were contingent on you having a use for them for your work, but still.
The car is because they don’t pay you shit for actual salary and a car is a huge tax cut (they budget 500 euros per month at my company). However, CoL is lower than America in most places.
They don’t pay your transit costs, some jobs have “meal check” compensation so 8€ per day or so. Not bad. Only some companies give phones. Probably ad many give work phones in America.
Also there is minimal or no pension fund contribution in many/most jobs and the pension system is on the brink of collapse it seems. No Roth IRAs here or anything. Don’t get paid enough to invest in anything. Everything goes into the house here because almost every single house that is affordable to people under 40 has to be stripped and fully renovated.
Also jobs are scarce right now. 2 companies hiring for PCB design stuff within 25 km of my house…
But as a whole, 32 required days of holiday by law, going to the doctor costs 4€ instead of 400, there isn’t any stigma about using all of your holiday, and consumer and worker protections are very good! Plus great public transportation.
A lot of those problems are true in the US/Canada as well (maybe more so; eg. pension). But unlike the US/Canada you get compensated for lunch and transit. AND you get a huge amount of time off. That alone is already drastically better than what you get in the US/Canada. Sure, if you make big bucks that’s mostly moot, but most people don’t.
In the UK it’s pretty clearly spelled out (although not always perfectly applied, I’m sure there’s still the odd boss trying it on).
Your working day starts when you arrive at your contracted place of work, and are ready to start work. Not when you walk in the door, before having a cuppa or breakfast in the office kitchen. Not after your computer has booted up and is ready for you.
If you have multiple places of work, or are travelling away from your contracted place of work, then your working day starts the moment you walk out your door and leave home.
The end of the day is the same, if you’re in the office it ends and then you leave, if you’re working away it ends when you get home (so factor in travel time and leave site before then).
Whether or not you actually get paid for every hour is another matter, however. Salary vs hourly work. If you’re salaried it’s supposed to be give and take - however it’s ultimately up to you to take what you can to balance it out. Work isn’t going to offer you an early finish, not as easily as they’ll ask you to stay late.
This may be factual law but just because a holy Law book says something that does not make it true.
The way i understand and perceive my job is as a basic equation for trade. I give, my time, body and energy and in return i receive a monthly paid liveable wage and some additional perks.
When i feel my return doesn’t match my input i have no reason to keep working. Many of my collogues have the benefit of a position that allowed full time WFH, mine simply does not, travel absolutely counts towards the investment i have to put in to do my work.
But to nuance my own perspective, i’m not complaining for not being paid my commute hours because i don’t recognize that i am being paid in hours. My contract may state i am paid per hour but paper is imaginary. Reality is that i get a monthly deposit. And if its enough to get by, stay healthy and have a little extra, then i am content human being and worker.
My workplace tracks hours for salaried workers, and we’re not allowed to accrue more than about a week of excess time without taking it, to the point where of we go over, our managers must put us on leave until the balance is below the limit
People find it pretty easy to take a day here and there, especially Fridays (it’s like no one believes people do anything productive on Fridays)
Your working day starts when you arrive at your contracted place of work, and are ready to start work. Not when you walk in the door, before having a cuppa or breakfast in the office kitchen. Not after your computer has booted up and is ready for you.
Kind of. The “ready to start work” bit is important. If your workplace has requirements that take extra time - such as a long walk from the front door to your desk, a computer that must go through a five-minute bootup process, a queue at the security gate, etc - those must be covered by the employer. But, yeah, arriving to work and having a panini in the kitchen isn’t going to net you thirty minutes of flexi.
When I did WFH my boss insisted that because I didn’t have to commute I should have all my tools up before my shift even starts.
I didn’t last very long.
This same company got sued up the ass when we were in office for trying to say we needed to have all our tools up before clocking in. But somehow WFH made it ok.
Any kind of work, should be after you clock in. Getting equipment, tools, software started etc. is work. Companies trying to deny that should be reported.
Pre-shift prep time is paid. At my last shift job, we were expected to be there and ready before the shift started, but we also got paid for that time.
That ruling is limited. It only applies for jobs where there is no local job site, e.g. construction workers who have changing construction sites.
If you work in an office or factory, or if your work is limited to a certain region (e.g. you clean houses in an area), then commuting to the office/factory/region is not part of the work day.
Otherwise you would get weird situations where people could apply to distant jobs and the employer having to pay those costs and hours. Get a job with a 2 hour one-way commute and you would then only need to work 4 hours… obviously not going to work.
Many employers in Europe actually do pay for some or all commute costs in order to attract workers, but usually they don’t pay for the commute hours.
Otherwise you would get weird situations where people could apply to distant jobs and the employer having to pay those costs and hours. Get a job with a 2 hour one-way commute and you would then only need to work 4 hours… obviously not going to work.
From an employee perspective, that’s not much of a problem but the solution is hardly complicated either. Wouldn’t employers just not hire people who live too far from the work site?
Otherwise you would get weird situations where people could apply to distant jobs and the employer having to pay those costs and hours. Get a job with a 2 hour one-way commute and you would then only need to work 4 hours… obviously not going to work.
The obvious solution is to limit it to the historically normal commute time (30 mins to 1hr each way)
You can choose to live 4 hours away, but the organisation only pays for x hours
I think the minimum commute time available to a young family person in my town now is 45 mins, so that would be an obvious limit here
I have it easier as a contractor, I have a MD rate and then I have a MD rate with commute + having to be in the office that’s twice the MD rate, they can decide if they really need me tp be there.
It’s a bit rude to say “8 hours at work, 8 for recreation, 8 for sleep” when the work is actually half an hour to an hour longer with the alleged “lunch break”, and rats into the recreation time typically an hour at each end
So really it’s 8 hours at work, 3 hours work related, 5 hours recreation (nb recreation time is also spent in the “recreation” of making oneself sufficiently presentable to attend the office), and 8 hours of sleep/missing sleep worrying about whether you can afford to commute (fuel, parking, bus fares) in the few days before pay day
i agree with this entire thing, but just for the pretense of seeming balanced, the commute home from work is often quite recreational imo. working from home and simply closing a browser is less satisfying than speeding away from the evil building. [but it is better in every other way]
Nah, driving home in the afternoon/evening rush was even more infuriating than the drive to work because it just seemed even slower and more time-consuming, eating into the vanishingly little time you have left for yourself
Workers aren’t grasping the managerial challenges of leading a remote workforce.
Cry me a fucking river
Each year, the average American spends nearly $8,500 and 239 hours traveling to and from work, per data from Clever Real Estate.
One could argue that’s “good” because it makes the wheel of economy turn. Gas pollution alone would make me say this is bad for all involved (except oil companies and their shareholders, but they can go fuck themselves)
Still, though, WFH Research also finds that fully remote work is associated with 10% to 20% lower productivity than fully in-person work [<- link to the research paper, go to page 10]. Barrero explained the disparity to Fortune in July: “In many of the studies we cite and in some of our own survey evidence, workers often get more done when remote simply because they save time from the daily commute and from other office distractions. This can make them look more productive on a ‘per day’ basis, even if it means they’re actually less productive on a ‘per hour’ basis.”
There’s no reason to “go above and beyond” when you’re in the comfort of your home. It’s why perceived “per hour” productivity drops. Besides, nobody actually works 8 hours straight, there are several pauses, even in an office or factory. We’re not robots.
When that commute is eliminated, they view it as a productivity increase. Employers, naturally, instead see it as less bang for their buck.
“You’ll waste precious hours of your day and you WILL LIKE IT, WAGESLAVE!”
Challenges in communicating remotely and lack of motivation are the main issues preventing fully remote workers from being more productive
Good luck motivating me to waste 2h every day without any raise or compensation in order to be “more productive in the office”
