Why Remote Work Pay Cuts Are Sanctimonious Bullshit

Companies are inflicting pay cuts on employees who don’t come back to the office. This is just plain wrong, but it would be wrong even without a plague: here’s why.

Headlines have been blaring about how Google employees agreed to pay cuts to keep working remotely.

I know I’m speaking in “almost a decade of not being someone’s employee” here, but I don’t think you should give in to this if your company is enacting such a policy. Stand your ground and demand to keep the salary you initially agreed to. Stand with your co-workers and help them demand the same!

But as someone who’s been far removed from negotiating salaries and having to work on an employer’s terms, I’m going to give my input on why remote pay cuts are bullshit. Because they are, and as someone who routinely sets my own rates and does my own negotiations, I am horrified at what’s taking place. These cuts would be ludicrous even if you didn’t have this whole deadly plague circulating where we’re now worse off than we were a year ago at the time of writing.

So, are you quaking at the thought of making this demand? I get it, losing a job has a higher magnitude than losing a prospect or deal. But if your employer is reasonable more often than not, you might want to keep these rebuttals in mind.

You’re being paid to do a job commensurate with your skills and experience, your location doesn’t automatically make it worth less to the company.

The whole appeal of having a digital business like mine is so you can easily move and travel. Once remote jobs for information-based work started to become the norm in 2020, remote employees got similar ideas. Sure, it’s a different dynamic when you MUST have your computer on at certain hours and your coworkers are now uninvited guests in your home, opposed to the complete privacy that us entrepreneurial freewheelers relish — but you can turn a laptop on anywhere with a decent connection speed. Even a desktop computer and a server, depending on what you do.

I traveled so much in the before time and would have to demarcate business travel (like conventions and speaker work) from “adventures” where I take my laptop but I got up and left for personal reasons, and vacations where I purposely leave my devices home and my automatic vacation responder is on.

My digital business is coming with me after my cross-country move. I’m even starting a new one, to boot. I take my skills and experience any place where I plunk down my devices. That is what my clients pay for.

I don’t charge my clients based on my location. They’re paying for all of my education, past jobs, 10 years of entrepreneurship, conference circuitry, my following — things that were already said and done. You busted your ass for your degrees, projects, work experience, certifications, etc.

My clients don’t expect me to suddenly charge $100 less for a 2-hour engagement if I were to relocate to a cheaper area. Why should you?

The company is benefiting from your credentials without respect to your location, unless they have a very location-specific need like an attorney licensed in Georgia or someone who can perform maintenance at a server facility in Illinois once a month.

Given that the pandemic proved a vast majority of these needs are not location-specific, you should get every penny you were initially promised. Maybe even MORE.

People can now choose lower living costs and other factors personally important to them instead of where the jobs are, when said jobs often made it so unaffordable to begin with.

Google’s pay cut policy is even more preposterous when you consider that they and other tech titans are responsible for making housing costs in the Bay Area so ridiculous to the point that even well-paid professionals can’t afford to live in or near San Francisco anymore.

Choosing to stay or leave where you are is both a personal and professional decision. I’ve had to factor both into my move, and it is largely a deeply personal one for me. Since my clients, websites, and royalty checks go anywhere I go, I could ostensibly set up shop anywhere I want. But I chose Los Angeles as a fifth-generation New Yorker, because big cities are simply in my blood and I’ll have different professional opportunities from hanging around in person out there compared to here. But when you’re an employee with a fixed salary, cost is probably going to be a larger determinant for where you choose to go.

So now that people have the option to leave for somewhere with lower burn rates while still making senior engineer salaries adjusted for high San Francisco or New York living costs — god forbid they build some wealth and pay off debt, maybe even buy a house. You know, the things financial magazines have been chiding Millennials about for years because we’re NOT doing them since everything just costs so much more than it did when we came of age?

But oh right, it’s fucking lattes and avocado toast to blame for why we’re not doing that as a generation. Which mysteriously, we’re now told we have to go back to the office and buy them to save the economy. Which one is it?

So now that some Millennials finally find a way to build wealth and no longer need to be anchored to the office, pundits are saying that it’s acceptable for companies to punish this decision instead of paying what you are actually worth to the organization.

Let me get this straight, it’s okay for corporations to reduce their overhead so they can hoard cash, but not workers? All while we were expected to hold our own with little or no material help from the government IN A PANDEMIC?

No. These titans of industry made these areas so expensive to live in and now they must reap what they have sown. If you want to buy a house somewhere for a fraction of the cost where you currently live, do it if you think you’ll be happy there while your money goes farther. Amazon and Facebook may be trying to revive the robber baron era “company town”, but these companies gentrified the bejesus out of America’s cities and made rat-infested 200 square foot closets in upper Manhattan go for $2,700 a month.

IN A WALK-UP.

They contributed to making areas into hotbeds which turned housing unaffordable, so now we take the power of the Internet in our hands, literally. That has zero to do with the services you provide to the company. Lower your overhead if you want, and demand what you’re worth.

You have lots of hidden and overt expenses when your home is your office as an employee.

It’s a different dynamic than what I’ve known as a free-flyer most of my working life, but with many of the same underlying principles. Some of these things are also pandemic-specific, like buying more toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and snacks for your kids because you’re not going anywhere else on a regular basis where these things would be provided.

But even when this is all over, you probably need to invest in a faster computer plus a more ergonomic desk and computer chair. These expenses could easily climb to begin with, but even steeper now that we’re amid a computer chip shortage.

Working at home also means higher electric bills to run more robust machines more often. You can keep the temperature to your liking, but roughing out the plague means high AC or heat bills when you don’t have somewhere else to bunker in where the lessee or owner is paying commercial utility bills. I had a rented office in that beautiful before time, and it was great for escaping prewar radiators. It’s also very different when you voluntarily rent an office to be near a healthcare provider, and no one is forcing you to be there at specific hours.

Then there’s supplying your own coffee, pizza, and salad delivery since I bet they took away the company Grubhub account “because you’re home”. Even if you think you’re saving money by buying groceries, you still have to schlep them home and take time to prep food. You’re paying in both time and money either way. While I’d happily rather pay for my own taco delivery and Aldi runs than deal with kindergarten-like office dynamics, point is that you’re still on the hook for staying fed, hydrated, and caffeinated once those free feeds at the office are gone. I mean, I miss those abandoned muffin trays from my rental. I got some great free breakfasts. Some other company was using the recording suite before me one day and asked if I wanted any of their leftover sandwiches and coffee because they ordered too much. I happily broke out the Ziplocks.

Then there’s pricey suckage of commuting. Need I say anymore?! But sky-high utility bills, depending on where you live, can end up equaling the cost of what you save on gas or fares.

So, you still have living expenses like an adult. Those expenses don’t go away just because you’re at home — in fact, they can add up. Plus, you shoulder those expenses while the company saves money on office space, pizza parties, and sundry. It’s hardly an excuse for a pay cut.

Moreover, cutting your pay because you don’t want to risk death or long term disability is a move that says your employer wants to control your life like an overbearing parent. Except that now, going to your room is probably the best thing you can possibly do for yourself and public health. And there’s zero justification for why you should get a smaller paycheck just because they don’t have their nose over your shoulder every minute of the day.

Which if they have to do that to get shit done, they’re probably an ineffective leader anyway.