Do you agree to the Terms and Conditions?
"The starting point is the employment contract. If employers wish to implement pay cuts for homeworkers this would constitute a change to terms and conditions, one employees are unlikely to agree to."
Not sure if they made an oversight with this statement... speaking as someone who has been working from home for many years pre-covid, the obvious change to the contract was changing my place of employment to my home address.
The employees will have a contract that states their place of work - currently, that would be the office/campus they have commuted to in the past. If they want to work from home permanently, that contract would need to change to reflect their new place of work, and if Google et al. wish to base their wages on the location of their place of work, then they would be able to make that change within the contract contingent on allowing the contractual change to work from home.
If Google chose to implement such a measure in contracts, it would seem they would be obligated to adjust wages if/when an employee moves, which could result in unforeseen implications for Google further down the line.
When it comes to homeworking, basing the wage on the home address is arguably a fallacy - a home worker could technically work for any company that allows working from home, so basing pay on the competitiveness of the geographical location of the workplace only makes sense for a centralised workplace, not homeworking addresses.
The whole point is to offer a comparative salary that is competitive or higher in relation to other workplaces in the area, to prevent employees leaving for higher salaries. If you work from home, "competitive salaries" are not those in your local area - they are any workplace that offers working from home. The unintended consequence will be that any other company with more foresight than Google could offer a competitive wage without needing their own office/campus.
As a homeworker, moving to another employer that allows homeworking would be so much easier as your "office" doesn't move.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
