Everytime I see "must pay", it scares me. Yes I know that employees get exploited etc but instead of making employers pay, why not let employees get a tax deduction or even a credit ? As an employer, I can tell you that the burden of employer paying for everything is not necessarily a good idea. It is not about the money only but also about the added overhead/red tape. In US, I am already sick of for example health insurance crap. I would gladly pay the same amount of money directly to the employee instead of dealing with insurance companies and their bullshit.
In this case, it makes no sense for employer to pay. Everyone lives differently, have different homes, different cost of utilities etc. It makes more sense to provide a tax deduction or credit to employee directly. If using this theory that just because someone is working from home, we should pay a portion of rent etc, then where do we stop. Why not pay for their coffee/tea while they are working at home. How do we draw the line ?
> It makes more sense to provide a tax deduction or credit to employee directly.
I, as a taxpayer, don't quite fancy having to pay for Amazon's 300k remote employees home-office while the company they work for doesn't pay any tax.
> How do we draw the line?
The line is already drawn, as an employer you are legally required to pay for the tools your employees need to do their work. So if the employee is a developer, that would be a laptop for example. Coffee and tea is not deemed necessary, so you don't have to pay for it.
In my opinion, a proper space to work is definitly a requirement and should be added to that list for remote workers. As well as a microphone and probably webcam at a minimum.
Asking taxpayers to pay for this instead of businesses makes 0 sense (although it's already like that in some juridictions).
Edit: I forgot to add that employers that will be switching to remote-first for the long term are the one that will save money on rent, while their employees will have a higher rent on average. So it does make quite a lot of sense for employer to pay and keep the balance in that scenario.
As they say, developers are machines that turn coffee into code. As such, if a line must be drawn, I would definitely draw it past coffee/tea and everything else which has a reasonable impact on developer productivity.
Employers are presumably paying taxes, so funding it through taxes is not letting them off the hook. Additionally, what about people who are unemployed (which is now >20% by U6 in the US) or work in jobs that don't offer healthcare? And what if you get fired? Or you want to change jobs but have a health condition which means you'll be in trouble without health insurance? Or your employer changes health insurance providers without consulting you and now your coverage or doctor has changed? These aren't hypotheticals, they're the daily reality of millions of people in the US.
I don't understand this weirdly business-centric view that folks from the US have on the topic of healthcare. Surely a more productive view is that it is the best interests of society that we keep our fellow citizens as healthy as possible? Even ignoring the ethical arguments (which should be more than enough), healthy citizens make healthy workers and reduce long-term healthcare costs caused by preventable illnesses.
Health insurance shouldn't depend on work or the size of your employer, period. Not only should employers have healthy employees, but the applicants should be too.
Health care really isn't the same thing. Employees don't need health insurance to work somewhere - and many pass, especially if they get insurance elsewhere (through a spouse, for example).
I've passed on a low-wage job because I was poor and couldn't afford to buy clothes before starting work - when, realistically, they could have provided the shirts or, alternatively, vests. And so on. It shouldn't cost an employee money to have a job with an employer.
If you want someone to have decent internet or a phone, the employer should pay part of it. A decent enough computer? Pay for it or provide a laptop. Provide the webcam. If you require uniforms, pay for them on top of laundering them. Requiring a quiet room in the house to do meetings? Pay for a portion of rent. Otherwise, you are just passing red tape and costs to the employee.
And the companies get blamed when they "pass costs on to consumers".
As if they had any other source of money. _All_ their money comes from consumers. If we don't want regressive taxation, then take this money as welfare by raising income tax.
"If we send people a check, the costs are passed on to the taxpaying public, which includes rich people who pay extra taxes and does not include poor people who get out of a lot of taxes because of their low income. If we pressure fast food places to pay more, the costs are passed on to fast food consumers, who are less likely to be wealthy and more likely to be black than the general population."
