If you pay everyone the same “travel allowance” then that’s just part of everyone’s total compensation and compensation will be reduced somewhere else. There’s no magic money fountain at a business. An employee’s compensation is an employee’s compensation. Simply declaring that “this portion of your pay is a travel allowance” is absolutely meaningless.
A company is not going to pay everyone more money just to help those who live far away who “need it”.
Well there sometimes is a magic money fountain. Like when the minimum wage goes up the money fountain just pays people more money that apparently wasn’t there before. Or when people ask for a raise and their boss tells them no so they leave and have to pay a new hire 140% of the original employee. The trick is to make the money fountain think you’re not going to work anymore because it’s only on a trickle. As soon as you stop working it remembers where all the money is. Magic
Economists like to pretend that currency is entirely rational, real, finite, and concrete, but it’s really not. That fiction only holds together as long as the bulk of people are willing to believe it.
Besides, these laws would never be two lines long like are written here. They would have addenda and provisions and such, preventing businesses from discriminating against employees based upon commute length, giving an upper limit, preventing a decrease in compensation to accommodate the commute benefit, and so forth.
And in the end would it turn out to be less than worthwhile? Maybe. But current remuneration in Western culture emphatically isn’t working. We need either one big change or lots of little changes, and this would fall in the latter category.
If you pay everyone the same “travel allowance” then that’s just part of everyone’s total compensation and compensation will be reduced somewhere else. There’s no magic money fountain at a business. An employee’s compensation is an employee’s compensation. Simply declaring that “this portion of your pay is a travel allowance” is absolutely meaningless.
A company is not going to pay everyone more money just to help those who live far away who “need it”.
Well there sometimes is a magic money fountain. Like when the minimum wage goes up the money fountain just pays people more money that apparently wasn’t there before. Or when people ask for a raise and their boss tells them no so they leave and have to pay a new hire 140% of the original employee. The trick is to make the money fountain think you’re not going to work anymore because it’s only on a trickle. As soon as you stop working it remembers where all the money is. Magic
Economists like to pretend that currency is entirely rational, real, finite, and concrete, but it’s really not. That fiction only holds together as long as the bulk of people are willing to believe it.
Besides, these laws would never be two lines long like are written here. They would have addenda and provisions and such, preventing businesses from discriminating against employees based upon commute length, giving an upper limit, preventing a decrease in compensation to accommodate the commute benefit, and so forth.
And in the end would it turn out to be less than worthwhile? Maybe. But current remuneration in Western culture emphatically isn’t working. We need either one big change or lots of little changes, and this would fall in the latter category.