The article makes 2 main points: 1) that this lawsuit will cause companies to take WFH away. and 2) It's extremely difficult to bill things like fractional electricity and internet usage.
The first is a flimsy premise because companies simply don't have the power to take WFH away and I think they know that. If they did, they would. But the collectivization for WFH, brought by lockdowns, is far too powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it's a hiring advantage for your competitors if you attempt to bar WFH.
The second point is just lazy. Billing for fractional usage is not impossible nor difficult, and you can bet if a company was billing a customer for fractional usage, they would have it down to an exact science. In fact, the resistance on this point shows the weakness of their position from the first point.
I do have some sympathy for the people who like to go to an office and interact with people face to face. But we've been operating with their preference as the default for a long time, so they can learn to adapt now.
> It's extremely difficult to bill things like fractional electricity and internet usage.
What I fear is the company wants to collect data on said usage as a solution to reimburse you accurately. Which means you send your employer usage data. Another world I don't want to live in.
> I do have some sympathy for the people who like to go to an office and interact with people face to face.
I think we're arriving at a compromise with hybrid work. Also, regarding gas commute costs, my employer still gives me a public transit card making bus and train usage free. I'm willing to make the trade for more home utility costs to avoid commute costs, even if I'm lucky enough to be able to use public transportation.
My company solved it by giving everybody a flat rate every month. We can use it for internet or getting a better office chair, or whatever we see fit. Seems fair.
Sure. It's the same basic "per diem" idea that's been in use in business for aeons to give employees reasonable compensation for expenses without bogging down accounting with thousands of receipts for $2.99.
> 2) It's extremely difficult to bill things like fractional electricity
Electricity metering is a solved problem, simply put all the office receptacles and lights on a single circuit and use a CT (current transformer) and a 120v submeter [0] to record energy usage. Landlords use these for tenant energy monitoring and billing in commercial real estate.
They can take away WFH. It’s pretty simple. “You are required in the office.” They will eventually back fill those roles or make those that are left to fill the gap. Either way, they can and will soon.
And then they'll wonder why they can't retain talent. "Must be this generation's work ethic and morals," they'll say, without a shred of self-awareness.
Atm the job market is still hot. But the tide is turning (or so the economists say). When/if this happens it's going to be an employers' market and if the employers' require a butt in the chair there's not much you can do.
IMO though full remote is not without serious downsides for the workers as well. Globalized market with localized salaries and alienation being just two of them. Being in my third year of fully remote I can testify to the second one.
It’s extremely easy. It’s possible to meter internet usage by a machine and also meter electricity consumption through an outlet. I imagine no one wants to go through the trouble of paying it.
I used to be one of those people who liked to interact with people face to face. I still do enjoy going to a dedicated space that isn't home and has people to interact with, but I traded going to the office every day with getting a WeWork.
I've seen a bunch of well-known companies now that have office space in WeWork's or similar co-working spaces in lieu of having their own office and wonder if this is a decent alternative to forcing a return to office. It also opened up traveling a bit more since I can go to any location and have reliable internet/space for taking calls.
My own company actually did this and got rid of their San Francisco office and instead renting an office in a WeWork in the area and giving San Francisco area employees a membership.
I really like being able to work from home, or for that matter anywhere I can plug in the laptop. That said, this article is a lot more significant than it looks, not because of labor/management power dynamics, but because California law has created an incredibly risky situation for employers that allow remote workers. And after looking at the statute, it looks like you couldn't even do a home office stipend and be safe from a lawsuit.
> The first is a flimsy premise because companies simply don't have the power to take WFH away and I think they know that.
If you view this from the position of power dynamics, reality is the issuer of paychecks will eventually win, especially because they will be driven by fear of lawsuits like this. This isn't the first time people got ran out of the office: back when 9/11 happened, everyone went remote, loved it, and then had to go back. Yes, tech wasn't as good, but we had WebEx (slow internet, though), instant messaging (better than slack & friends) and email.
> So powerful, in fact, that it's a hiring advantage for your competitors if you attempt to bar WFH.
I'm not so sure this is the case. For a lot of people, there was not a salary adjustment when COVID set them free of the office. A lot of people moved to lower cost areas... and kept their salary. Eventually, salaries will normalize to local prevailing wage, plus or minus for the job title and positioning of the job (i.e. we are a better employer and have better pay and benefits) and companies will use a round of layoffs to adjust this. It makes no sense to pay a developer SV salary if they are in Modoc, Indiana or moved to Estonia now.
> Billing for fractional usage is not impossible nor difficult, and you can bet if a company was billing a customer for fractional usage, they would have it down to an exact science.
The point the article is making is that employees suing over de minimus costs is really bad for workers. The energy star tag on my monitor and laptop say I can power both for $28 per year. The guy in the article is suing over $50-$100/month. Seems like there's a lot to argue about... so there is substantial risk. It will cost the employer $18k-$50k to deal with the lawsuit.
The difference is that this lawsuit's judgement will affect not just Amazon but every tech company in California. The thousands of companies that popped up remote-friendly positions overnight will all have to reassess their stance now that they could be on the hook for employees' electricity, internet and even rent.
Right now Amazon and Google have to compete with a startup that is offering a competitive salary and fully remote positions. Can the startup survive if employees start billing them for the cost of their home office?
If you look at the IRS rules for deductibility on a home office, they are pretty strict. It needs to be a physically defined area that is used only for work. If you use the same area as living space, or use the same desk and computer for personal stuff, it's not deductible. If you work off of a laptop, sometimes sitting on the couch, sometimes at the kitchen table, it's not deductible. I don't know if California law is more relaxed, but if it is, then I would think that any expense reimbursements would be taxable income at the federal level.
None of this is easily verifiable. Are the tax agencies going to install cameras in your office and monitor your internet traffic to verify compliance?
Not recommending tax fraud, but as a practical matter, these are non-issues.
Such a myopic view. How would you onboard new employees? I started a new job remotely and it was hell. I learned more in the first two weeks in the office than I did in the first 2 months working remotely.
My company has onboarded thousands of people since COVID started, and new employees are as productive as ever. There are enough successful companies that have been remote-only since day one and have no trouble with it. Sure onboarding is hard, whether in person or remote, but that doesn't mean it's an unsolvable problem.
I worked in person for a local govt and remotely for a large tech company with a completely remote team.
The onboarding was terrible for the local govt. Mostly focused on legal aspects-they expected me to have office communication skills off the bat and they offered little for training with mobile techs that I was hired to do (I just did one or two projects and they assumed I already had full experience). The office politics were dreadful. Lots of meetings where things were not decided and often missing people that could answer questions. When you reach out by email, they just visit you by your desk, ask clarifying questions and explain things verbally, often referring to a site that I have to manually type in.
The large tech company had a terrific 3 month onboarding process and I was slowly eased by senior members into taking on the more repetitive work. I learned more about the company in two weeks then I did for my 6 months for that govt. If there is a question, I can reach out by email and setup an inpromptu google meet-links and commands to use are shared in the chat and easily used and tested. Decisions were made and I am building connections in the industry with people in and outside of work that do not work in my area.
By having a comprehensive onboarding plan that is designed to give remote engineers everything that they need to get up to speed and start contributing.
As a counterpoint to your anecdote, I also just started a new job remotely at a company where they invested time and effort into their onboarding experience and it was miles better at preparing me for my role than when I onboarded at my previous two companies in person.
I joined a team that's already all over the place geographically and would spend lots of time on conference calls with other sites. Now we are all just permanently remote and it's fantastic.
You download the repo, learn the stack, look over the codebase, set up the environment (someone might have to help you on this at first with a screen share call if there's no documentation), work on some small tickets, ask questions, and get feedback. Easy. I've always gotten up to speed and productive within a week or two this way, without there being any real onboarding documentation or plan in place to boot. Never had a serious job in an office but I feel like it would have only slowed me down.
Same. When you get a certain level of experience built up, you figure out how to poke around the codebase / pipelines to learn what you need to know. Is it frustrating at times? Sure. But it’s easier for me to retain than reading 3 year old word docs.
I started a new job remotely (pre-COVID, the company had ~zero WFH) and onboarding was very smooth with two in-person interactions to pick up hardware; was contributing in less than two weeks.
My understanding is that California’s language is pretty unambiguous that businesses are responsible for all work expenses. I think on the legal merits the engineer may ultimately prevail, but I just don’t see how this is a battle worth fighting considering the massive savings that work from home already provides. It’s likely a lawsuit like this could also damage one’s long-term career prospects.
It will be interesting to see whether the courts see a difference between incremental expenses vs things the employee was already purchasing (e.g. internet vs electricity)
Yeah whether the employee is right or not I really don't see the logic in a senior engineer suing their employer for $50/mo in costs.
In the absolute best case, this will become a class action lawsuit. All ~4000 employees will get a couple thousand dollars as reimbursement. Lawyers will make a few million. Amazon will find the money from under some couch cushion. And then they will allocate a portion of everyone's salary to "WFH expenses" to be in the clear legally. Meanwhile the plaintiff's name will be all over the news and their future job prospects will take a huge hit.
The bigger cost would be a rent equivalent on a home office. That's probably low five figures annually.
But I don't agree with the overall conclusion. Ultimately the cost of an employee boils down to one number. If they have to pay 15k for home office rent then salary will just be 15k less.
I agree with you generally but there’s also the question of whether an expense is reasonable. Should you be expected to put a desk in your bedroom and have that be sufficient? I live in New York and have an extra bedroom for my office, should my employer be forced to pay for that instead?
Not really. If the market clearing price was X before there's no reason it will change from X. The compensation will just in the form of Y rent + (X - Y) salary
It does raise the question of why large companies _aren't_ responsible for paying for commuting costs. We've obviously never done it that way, but is there a reason that we couldn't?
Because (thank goodness) employers don’t have a say in where you live or what your commute looks like.
If you want a long train commute because you enjoy audiobooks and living near woodlands, great. If you want a studio apartment in the building next to the office, great. If you live halfway across the city but are already dropping your kid off at school next to the office, great.
The employer doesn’t need to know or become invested in any of those choices. Otherwise, we end up on a road where employers push for you to live in ways that are most appropriate to their financial interests. No thanks.
That said, many employers do offer things like universally available metro passes or gas cards as a token acknowledgment of commute costs more broadly. That seems like a good balance of autonomy and support.
The WFH corollary is if your employer started paying for a WFH spare bedroom (which almost certainly costs more than office space for one desk), they'd only pay you for median (at best) rent for that room. Why should they pay for a bedroom in SF when you could just as easily be in Akron.
Actually many large companies subsidize or outright cover public transit costs. Many subsidize parking costs if they don’t provide free parking.
But mode of transportation is mostly left to the individual. They pay you enough and you can decide where to live and how to commute. Everybody’s needs are different — why have a program?
The answer I heard is because part of the initial salary negotiations the employer/employee should have already factored that in.
However, it could make sense that if they initially worked from home, then had to start commuting, the company should pay for gas, car maintenance, tolls, public transportation, etc.
Then, the same goes in reverse, if the worker agreed to the salary working from the office, when forced to work from home, they could make a case of the company having to pay for monitors, a desk, electricity, a faster internet, etc.
The company offers you a salary/wage. It is up to you to determine whether that can cover your commute costs and if the job is worth it when factoring that in. If the company gets involved in calculating individual commute expenses for everyone, they’ll have to hire a department of accountants to handle it. Instead, companies pay you a lump sum (salary) and you decide what to do with it. This is one of the basic purposes of our market economy
Long time ago I worked for a company where people were paid for time they were travelling to the office (with transport cost covered on top of that). This rule applied only to older folks who had their contracts signed when such terms were offered (at the time when I was joining this clause was already removed). This was in London and some people were travelling 2 hours one way (so 4 hours of paid travelling time every day). Though.. I also thought it is a bit waste of life to spend 4 hours travelling every single day.
That means people with cheaper commutes get paid less than people with more expensive commutes. Why would you do that? You’re effectively rewarding people for living further from work and driving less fuel efficient vehicles, which both makes no business sense and is terrible for the environment.
I think the business doesn't really care where you live.
I have made decisions to live close to my offices, not just for commute but because I consider myself responsible to go in when things break and spending 1.5hrs commuting won't do that.
When I priced it up when I lived in London it came out to be about the same cost to live closer to the office than to commute even with public transport (which is not horrendously expensive) -- assuming I paid myself what my boss would pay me for my time commuting.
Honestly we surely need to discuss WFH in laws terms, in the sense of "I worker provide a room, empty, accessible for inspection, the company provide furniture etc, I'm responsible to keep it safe and closed etc" or "I, worker, provide a room, well equipped, and the company pay me a fee for my work and room usage".
But that's not a thing to be discussed in court. It's a thing to be publicly discussed in political terms to arrive at a CLEAR and defined norm for WFH. In some country such norms already exists but are a bit old, meant for another tech era, in some others do not exists at all.
For instance in Italy there are two norms, the ancient clear but hard, a new one opaque and obscene. The first is for "teleworking", it MANDATE an empty room, inspectable by a public body responsible for safety at work, locked, furnished by the company, with dedicated services provided by the company etc. The second is "smart working" witch essentially state that workers and companies agree a kind of place-less, by-target works no one surveil, the company just provide a craptop and a crapphone and all are f** and happy. Clearly both norms are not good at all.
For instance we need to separate time-defined jobs (like call centers, banking, ...) to potentially async ones (like development) and so regulate them accordingly. We need to define "a home workspace" but without exaggerations like the Italian "telelavoro" laws etc. To do so discussing is mandatory, and courts are not a good place to discuss and negotiate...
In australia you can claim things like internet or computer and such at home if it’s used for work. Used to claim back half my internet costs every year.
I live in a US state with similar laws, and it's constantly a conversation of "do I need to remind you of state law?" when I'm asked to explain an expense report for an $80 monthly phone bill.
That conversation often evolves sometimes in to one of two separate discussions: "then give me a work phone" or "then hire an overnight crew".
The law is same here in France. If it's used for work purposes, the employer should cover it at least at 50%.
In a similar vein, commute costs ( by public transit) and food at lunch are covered at 50% or more, because they're making you come into an officr. Of course with remote work those no longer apply.
I’m pretty surprised that places like Amazon doesn’t pay for home internet. My current employeer it the first in a long time that doesn’t pay my internet bill.
Electricity can be deducted on my taxes, but I need a seperate meter if I want to do that.
My company used to pay for anyone who did on-call work, but they stopped because the internet got to the point of being ubiquitous. People would still have a decent internet connection with or without the job.
I did actually read one of the recent corporate policies and they will pay up to $30/month toward home internet, but only for those who are full time WFH (not related to COVID). I haven't bothered to do it. It's a lot of hassle for $30.
I'm not sure I agree with the article. I'm not even sure that I get corporate logic at this point.
Offices cost money, much more money than configuring an enterprise for remote work. There's always that minor percentage of employees who cannot develop successful patterns to work from home. As the pandemic showed, these folks are the minority today.
Under this paradigm, as long as remote work costs less than a building then remote work should be attractive to a company. Yet, many companies are chasing hybrid models even though that direction causes a good bit of attrition as well (people want the whole thing).
My personal hypothesis is that companies are doing an organized, long term pull out of offices, but are resisting doing it all at once because they'd impact each other's commercial property values. This confusing state we're in is purposeful.
> My personal hypothesis is that companies are doing an organized, long term pull out of offices, but are resisting doing it all at once because they'd impact each other's commercial property values. This confusing state we're in is purposeful.
I doubt it, because most companies rent their space and they wouldn't care about the impact to the building. I think your premise is flawed:
> There's always that minor percentage of employees who cannot develop successful patterns to work from home. As the pandemic showed, these folks are the minority today.
Sure, maybe most people can develop 'successful patterns', but that doesn't mean that most people are most productive at home (in the eyes of company heads). The term 'successful patterns' is relative given the situation, and right now that means doing the best we can given the circumstances.
Most of the stories we here about pushing people back to work are really large companies with pretty significant investments in their campus. They aren't the smaller places that rent a bit of office space. Of course, I assume those leases are long, so they may still be locked in, even if they don't own them.
An empty building, or even a partially filled building, still costs a lot of money to keep. Having that expense when they aren't using it and can't see the value must drive the finance guys nuts. So if the company is paying for a space for an employee in the office, and they are playing for their expenses at home, the cost of that employee's workspace just doubled.
For a lot of companies, they rent from another LLC under the owner's control that owns the building, letting the owner pocket the rent/charge whatever they want for it while building a commercial real estate business.
It is possible - my home office is on a separate circuit (own DB board) and I have a electricity consumption monitor on it.
I remember when we went WFH and I was so cheesed over the disruptions in Teams meeting when colleagues used those shitty $10 Chinese made earbuds - asked management to at least supply everybody with a Plantronics headset so we don't waste time.
I was told - we are professionals (we need to buy our own shit) - end of story
My employer purchased whatever was needed from desks, office chairs, monitors, keyboards, mice to headsets.
We also completely ran out of "old" stuff, in the junk room, where people didn't want a new screen/keyboard but one exactly (exactly) like the one they had in the office.
We didn't try anything for heating and electricity though. How much do you actually use, if your use is normal office type stuff?
What about HVAC? My laptop and monitor probably add up to 100W. That's maybe $2 of electric per month? My added HVAC bill from being at home is much more, and I'm not sure how to split the bill for it.
Using about 190W - i6700 desktop - Dell Optiplex Mini and HPE mini server (Gen 10)
Don't use HVAC during winter - only during summer but it sits on another circuit.
This is absurd and greedy of the employee. Surely the cost of internet and electricity would be a drop in the ocean compared to an Amazon engineer's salary.
As an aside, here in India, most companies do reimburse internet charges. But then broadband internet is quite cheap here - my 300Mbps connection only costs me around $25/month.
The first is a flimsy premise because companies simply don't have the power to take WFH away and I think they know that. If they did, they would. But the collectivization for WFH, brought by lockdowns, is far too powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it's a hiring advantage for your competitors if you attempt to bar WFH.
The second point is just lazy. Billing for fractional usage is not impossible nor difficult, and you can bet if a company was billing a customer for fractional usage, they would have it down to an exact science. In fact, the resistance on this point shows the weakness of their position from the first point.
I do have some sympathy for the people who like to go to an office and interact with people face to face. But we've been operating with their preference as the default for a long time, so they can learn to adapt now.