[tawan]

The disconnect in this conversation between employer and employee happens for these reasons: In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

Now comes the pandemic which forces - or should I say “allows” - companies to try out the remote model in unison without the risk of being the first mover.

It turns out that it works good enough. But then a company must be questioning why it should continue paying the location premium to employees if it doesn’t see any benefit in it anymore. Adjusting existing salaries downwards, even though the employees didn’t make any changes in their commitment, is socially unacceptable.

Now companies hope that if an employee decides to take advantage of the new freedoms they have an open for this conversation where they try to cut the location premium based on COL arguments, which they know is not the real reason.

If it would be up to companies alone, they would have already reduced all our salaries and if we wouldn’t have liked that, they would have said.. well just move to a lower COL area, we don’t mind

[nrmitchi]

> In reality companies had to pay a premium in order to demand that an employee lives in certain geographic area so that they show up every day in a certain office building. Depending on the location of the building, the premium can be very high.

100% agreed with this. I personally see no issue in paying a premium if an employer is asking for something extra, like being in a specific location, or working odd hours, paying a premium is reasonable. There are many reasons why a company may want someone to be on-site in a specific city; this applies if the city is SF, or a small city.

The issue that I personally have is when location is not a factor, but is still factored in to "location dependent pay". Pay someone in SF more because it's important to you for them to be phsycially present? Sure. Pay someone in Oklahoma less than someone in Austin, despite the fact that neither of their locations makes a difference to their work? Now you're openning yourself up to implicit discrimination and "unfair" conditions.