Airbnb will let staff work from anywhere without a pay cut Room rental biz Airbnb on Thursday said it will allow its employees to work from anywhere and compensation will remain flat or increase within countries. At other tech firms like Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, among others, pay has been cut for employees electing to work remotely. Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky …
Good for them, and shame on Facebook et al. The work I do provides a certain amount of added value to my employer and I expect to be compensated accordingly; no more and no less. Whether I choose to live where the cost of living is high or low has no relevance to that added value and should not be taken into account.
Talking about work-from-anywhere positions, naturally.
Conversely, part of the reason that Bay Area jobs pay so highly is that they must in order for staff to be able to live there. If you move to West Armpit, Nebraska, where a Bay Area salary would probably buy you the better part of a county, it's a little harder to justify the higher wage.
That said, given wage stagnation in the US for the past several decades, I think this is a good move which will hopefully help distribute some wealth to other parts of the country.
a good move which will hopefully help distribute some wealth to other parts of the country
...or to parts of another country.
While it's disingenuous for companies with significant offshore/nearshore operations to demand their directly-employed staff congregate in offices, it's equally disingenuous to suggest that WFH will ultimately lead to some sort of nirvana for wage slaves. There's now sufficient economic incentive to make WFH the default and sufficient experience to demonstrate that it can be: the market will now take over and determine where those homes will be.
"Conversely, part of the reason that Bay Area jobs pay so highly is that they must in order for staff to be able to live there"
Conversely to your conversely, the corporation can downsize the offices, pay much lower energy costs, not employ so many ancillary workers (cleaners, maintenance etc), so vastly reducing their running cost base.
As the main facilities manger once said to me about the London offices right in the square mile that they were soon leaving, he pointed at a waste paper basket and stated, "That bin costs a over thousand pounds a year"
And that was 10 years ago.
But then how can they have a willy waving contest who has the best organic soy lattes at the earth cafe, bean bag laden meet space.
Not so. The company was only "happy" because they felt they had little other choice but to pay high bay area salaries to attract the required talent in an era where that location was all the rafe. If it now turns out they don't then why would they? They've opened themselves up to talent from all around the country that is no longer faced with the prospect of having to move to that neighbourhood, nor desires the beanbag filled breakout utopia.
That's the basic flaw with location neutral salaries - you either end up somewhat|significantly increasing your salary costs (for people who would have worked for less money), or excluding people who are already settled in an area with a very high cost of living.
I suspect that after the initial hype the salaries will drift downwards, meaning new hires just won't be from expensive locations like the Bay Area. Or the salary bands will massively expand so that recruits from the Bay Area will be hired at the top end of the "single" salary band and other places lower down.
>I suspect that after the initial hype the salaries will drift downwards
With the reduced need to physically be in the Bay area, we can expect demand for Bay area property to drop and so whilst it may remain 'expensive' it shouldn't increase at the same rate as it has in the past. Which in turn will feed into the Bay area wage weighting.
If we look at the effects of lockdown, where effectively earnt money was no longer spent in London but in the area where people lived, we can expect some degree of levelling-up; so actually paying location neutral salaries you are actually encouraging levelling up and so reduce the cost-of-living differences between locations.
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