| I think it's a mistake to frame this with respect to 'fairness'. If you were another company instead of an individual you would not be having this discussion with your employer. Would they try to bring the price of IT equipment down, with the argument of a shorter delivery route, if they were doing business with a retail business close by their office? For HR the best outcome is to get the best people possible for the lowest price possible. The best outcome for you as an employee is to get the maximum compensation + benefits + bonuses for the least amount of your time/effort. For the archetype factory employee, their value grows linearly with time spent working. For a knowledge worker the output of a small team of 10/20 people could generate orders of magnitude more, the time spent is not relevant what matters is the value adding output. So if you want to think in terms of fairness don't frame it in terms of the 40 hours a week, frame it in terms of the profit generated or money saved as a direct result of your output. |
As I pointed out here[1] this is hard to do and no company does this. If you can find a way to quantify your value to the company, that's great. 90+% of the cases I've seen where people do it, they're making wild assumptions that no employer would buy, though.
> Would they try to bring the price of IT equipment down, with the argument of a shorter delivery route, if they were doing business with a retail business close by their office?
No, but they would bring the price down if they could buy it cheaper from a competitor. If you live in a low COL area, they could try to argue that they can find other employees in your area for whom they could pay less than what you demand, and those people would still get paid more than the average in that area.
There's a reason outsourced employees in other countries don't get paid as much as they do in the US. Do not expect that you can change that dynamic easily.
Of course, if you can demonstrate that it'll be hard for them to find a remote worker with your (perhaps rare) skills, then your argument would be more appealing to them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21685035