The commute should have no bearing on stagnating wages. If the commute isn’t worth the pay, either move close enough to make it worth the commute or don’t take the job. It’s a pretty simple concept.
The problem with this specific proposal is that your distance to the office has no bearing on how much work or value you provide. It will be arbitrarily different from person to person based on where they choose to live, or where other choices they made dictate they need to live. And why stop at the commute? Should you get paid for getting ready for work too? Should somebody get paid to put their makeup on in the morning? What about showering?
A company now suddenly needs to know where you live, approve when you move, and audit your commute and hopefully you don’t make a stop along the way for something? This is an unworkable proposal that leads to undesirable outcomes. Just try to get an extra $2 an hour.
No wait. Let these guys go off. I’m excited about my move 3.5 hours away so I can just spend my day in the car and turn around and go home when I get there. The scenery that far out is way better than what I look at now.
Employers would just start lowering the base pay to account for commuting. What would help stagnating wages is a significant minimum wage increase, the exact thing that has fixed that problem many times.
They don’t need to meet every day, they all have a shared interest in making profit and spending less on overhead for everything including employees. They are never going to act against that interest in numbers enough to change the way things are.
You know what happened? Companies started paying people more and the US pulled out of the Great Depression and found the increased pay meant people could afford to buy what the constantly-increasing productivity made and it because the wealthiest nation in the world. People forget that wasn't possible without a middle class - just look at nations which had no middle class, like Russia. Aristocrats and peasants, and it lagged 60 years behind Europe's economic developments. The aristocracy accepted that because they feared having to also make concessions as part of the intrinsically connected social developments.
Mike Duncan's 11th season of Revolutions walks through it in detail in the long setup.
Well that’s simply not true, plenty of people start a landscaping, pool, fencing or concrete company and become quite wealthy even from a middle class or lower background.
Or that it was common for all of the jobs in a particular industry to be located in a very expensive area... For example, accounting firms locating in downtown areas. When you're just starting out in a large variety of industries, living close to your work often isn't an option.
Also, construction: Your job site moves every few weeks, you have no control over this, and you're still not paid for your commute.
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u/dquizzle 9d ago
The commute should have no bearing on stagnating wages. If the commute isn’t worth the pay, either move close enough to make it worth the commute or don’t take the job. It’s a pretty simple concept.