Work

Working from home could come at a cost

Google has told staff their pay could be cut if they switch to working from home permanently

Google has produced a calculator that helps its employees assess what the difference in pay would be if working from home. Photograph: AFP via Getty

Thu Aug 12 2021 - 05:55

If the pandemic has done anything in the world of work, it has been to bring the concept of working from home firmly into the mainstream. Companies that tut-tutted dismissively at flexible working requests just a couple of years ago are now having to get their head around the reality that office life will, for many, never be quite the same again.

But losing the commute and gaining more time to be with family – or just to unwind – could come at a cost.

Tech giant Google has told staff their pay could be cut if they switch to working from home permanently. Whether it will, and to what degree, will be determined by local costs of living.

And it has produced a calculator that helps its employees assess what the difference in pay would be. The results have caused some alarm, with cuts of up to 25 per cent being presented.

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The system is being piloted in the US, but could in time apply to workers in Dublin and elsewhere, with the company’s Irish spokeswoman saying its pay has always been determined by location.

But how revolutionary is the concept?

London has attracted a pay "weighting" for decades for workers in both the public and private sector.

And, as far back as the turn of the century, some public service unions in Ireland – notably the Irish Nurses Organisation, as it then was – were calling for a Dublin premium or weighting for their members on the basis of the extra costs involved in living in the capital.

Certain private sector employers actually made such payments

So, even in Ireland people were paid – or their representatives sought for them to be paid – more for doing the same job as others because they were incurring higher costs as a result of their workplace being in Dublin.

That logic, in reverse, presumably dictates that workers moving from a Dublin-based post to working from home down the country where living costs are lower – and the cost of commuting has disappeared – should see their pay fall to reflect this new cost base.

It’ll be interesting to see how many lobby for remote working if that proves to be the case.

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