23 ms·

>Most companies don’t do this because of the mountain of complexities with taxes, payroll, and time zone availability, but I hope we can open-source a solution

• lovemenot 4y ago
  >> I think this is a genius move for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb! Yes. Like the story of Ford doubling the wages it paid to factory workers in 1920s. So that those workers could afford a car, and the whole economy eventually followed suit.
  • Kbelicius 4y ago
    That story isn't true. The reason why wages/bonuses were raised/introduced by Ford is because of turnover.
    • gowld 4y ago
      What's the difference?
    • lovemenot 4y ago
      I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary. You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?
      • Kbelicius 4y ago
        >I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary. You'd be hard pressed to provide a search pattern in any search engine that would provide a top 5 result that isn't about Ford wage raises in 1914 being about anything else than worker retention. > You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making? Nor did you provide any substantial point. What is it with double standards today? My point was that you are spreading falsehoods.
        • lovemenot 4y ago
          Both reasons are in fact correct, but only one person here is accusing the other of being wrong and spreading lies. Please be more circumspect in your language. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-minimum-wage/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min... Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid. But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
• sha_burn 4y ago
  They don't have the pull to change immigration laws but they can set and prove the standard to execute with excellence with this model. To the other comments, it is an expense-less raise. To the California tax base, it is yet another wakeup call.
  • mantas 4y ago
    No need for immigration laws change for work/travel, especially when it's capped to 90 days.
• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  I'm not an immigration/tax lawyer and could be completely wrong but if you're from EU/US/UK/AUS etc I'm fairly sure you can work in another one of those countries for up to 90 days (and sometimes upto 183) without paying tax there or getting a work visa - as long as you're still resident and being paid in your home country under the Visa Waiver program. I've worked in NY offices and got paid in UK (admittedly a while ago and for less than 90 days) - but can't see why working in an Airbnb would be different. Has anyone experience of this recently?
  • pvtmert 4y ago
    This only works if you are holder of passport of the origin country. As a third world country national, I cannot legally work anywhere except the country I got my work visa. PS: Even if company is multinational corporation.
    • frederikvs 4y ago
      Tangent, but it turns out terms like "third world" are no longer accurate. If memory serves, this is explained in the book Factfulness. A highly recommended read, by the way. A few decades ago, there was a group of wealthy countries, a group of poor countries, and a large gap between them. Back then it made sense to see them as 2 separate groups, first world and third. Right now however, they're no longer separate groups - there's a continuous spectrum. A growing number of countries have been crawling out of poverty. Some countries are rich, some are poor, and some are in between. They're no longer separate groups. (This of course does not mean that there isn't a poverty problem in the world. Just that "third world" no longer accurately describes the situation.)
      • strangeattractr 4y ago
        Weren't the terms used to connote alliance with the US (first world) or the USSR (second world) and third world meant non-aligned?
        • 4y ago
• lultimouomo 4y ago
  > I think everyone wins here. Everyone except the cities that have already lost a quantity of apartments and offices that have been repurposed as AirBnBs...
  • Gud 4y ago
    Why are the cities the losers? I travel a lot for work(300 days/year) and I don’t have an apartment, so when I’m not working I’m pretty much also traveling. Occasionally I use Airbnb and I think it’s a much nicer option than hotels.
    • devmor 4y ago
      Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now. Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.
      • Hedepig 4y ago
        Do you think this is an primarily caused by Airbnb?
        • lifeformed 4y ago
          It's not the only cause but a significant one.
        • comprev 4y ago
          It will be interesting to see what happens in Amsterdam over the next few years since they clamped down hard on AirBnB. Hosts now have to be officially registered with the city. AirBnB lost something like 90% of their hosts overnight!
          • Gareth321 4y ago
            Many major cities are clamping down hard. Mayors and politicians are under much more pressure from locals to stop their cities turning into, well, Amsterdam. Tourism is fine, but it has increasingly come at the cost of locals.
• cush 4y ago
  Everyone wins except people who can't afford a home to live in.
• oxfordmale 4y ago
  90 days is safe limit as advised by lawyers. In some countries you can stay much longer without incurring any tax implications, however, as a company you want to avoid your staff getting into legal difficulties if they stay overstay by one day for whatever reason (oversight, delayed flight, etc). Very few staff tend to take 90 days in one chunk. It is often used for 4-6 weeks to either visit family, or have a working holiday in a tropical holiday location. Timezones can be an issue for some job roles, however, you can ask staff to mostly keep working according their original timezone if there is a time critical element to their job role. However, in most cases it is actually great to have someone working either earlier or later than the rest of your staff. It reduces the window for out of hours support.
• noduerme 4y ago
  Yeah, eventually everyone will be staying in AirBnb's hotel and paying all the mortgage/upkeep on their own property to rent it to AirBnb. "It's like Uber for real estate".
• peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > I think everyone wins here. except for the cities flooded by tech workers that do not belong to the community. Like it's happening to Barcelona.
  • ErneX 4y ago
    Which community is that?
    • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      Ever heard of locals? You can't imagine how much better Rome has been in these last two years without Americans coming to colonize our historical districts. It's not entirely Americans fault, they do not belong here, don't know the language, the traditions, but they gather together all in the same place and suddenly it's not Rome anymore and obviously prices skyrocket up to the point that locals can't afford to live there anymore, after generations many have been forced to leave their family houses.
      • ErneX 4y ago
        But this isn’t something you can just blame on tech workers. Big cities go through this constantly not only from tech expats but also from better paid local workers.
        • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
          > Big cities go through this constantly No, they don't. Ask someone from Rome, Barcelona, Madrid even Warsaw, if they are happy of this airbnb-ization of their cities. [1] Anyway, cities are for citizens, not for freeloaders. [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/airbnb-sharing-economy-cities-barcelona-inequality-locals https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/airbnb... [2] The word city and the related civilization come from the Latin root civitas, originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member'
          • 4y ago
• bbrks 4y ago
  Many young European countries reliant on tourism, like Croatia, introduced digital nomad/remote working visas mid-COVID to encourage people to stimulate their local economies when tourism suffered the most.
• boh 4y ago
  It's funny how this is meant to be interpreted as a work/life benefit for employees when it is clearly a removal of labor restrictions for the company. If you can hire anyone from anywhere your cost of labor will decrease overall. Yes "you can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change", so future salaries don't have to reflect local expenditures. You can offer flat rates that encourages people to move out of high cost cities and decrease your overall labor costs. The idea that this is a win/win is seductive but it won't be. Increasing the labor pool chips away the leverage an employee has at the negotiation table.
  • gowld 4y ago
    Employee doesn't need leverage if their income isn't going to pay a landlord.
• timmg 4y ago
  > I think everyone wins here. One theory I have (and it may be wrong): is that part of the rise we've seen in housing prices is due to WFH and AirBnB. Lots of people I've worked with who were WFH in the pandemic would spend a week (or a month) in a rental while they work, here and there. And during that time, their house/apartment would be empty. Imagine everyone does that for (say) 3 weeks a year. That's a 6% increase in "housing usage". A 6% shock to the housing market is significant when supplies can't react quickly to the rise in demand.
  • sjs7007 4y ago
    What about the reduction in office space usage that will have to be repurposed into something else?
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
      Office buildings are typically not suitable for conversion into apartments, there are no provisions for things like individual bathrooms or kitchens.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Even if they could be converted (and most buildings after a certain height are basically the same except for the interior) they'd likely be torn down and rebuilt; if they even can be due to zoning. People love to hate on zoning but there are reasons for it, even if the way it's done isn't perfect by a long shot.
    • delecti 4y ago
      Commercial leases can't be repurposed that quickly, and I suspect a lot of companies are holding off on doing anything different with their office space. If the past two years have resulted in permanent change, then some office space will likely get repurposed, but it's too early to tell whether it's permanent, and nobody wants to jump the gun and get it wrong.
• wildmanx 4y ago
  > I think everyone wins here. The airline industry surely will. The environment likely won't. (But who cares about a few polar bears if you can just work from Shanghai for a few weeks, right? /s)
  • XenophileJKO 4y ago
    Does the environment really lose? Along with this comes the reduction of commuting. Curious to see how the math works out on that one.
    • saalweachter 4y ago
      You could probably formulate a migratory plan based on where you can live to minimize heating and cooling costs.
    • wildmanx 4y ago
      Hm, I don't think one should be contrasted with the other. That is, WFH somewhere in your home city is independent of traveling the world. We can promote the former without encouraging the latter, but Airbnb is mostly doing the latter. (It's their business model after all to provide services for people who do not stay at home.)
• wcarron 4y ago
  It is, in my opinion, a massive and near total loss for all the renters, first-time homebuyers, existing families, and the sense of community in areas affected by AirBnB's cancerous growth.
  • dcgudeman 4y ago
    Why?
    • 0xB31B1B 4y ago
      because supply and demand matter, and units that are AirBnB'ed are taken off the market for long term rentals, leading to rents for locals rising higher than trend. Even given that in the perfect economy construction would keep up with demand, there is a ~5-10 year lag between demand signal and correction in construction (prices rise, new construction breaks ground, new construction opens, new constructions absorbs marginal demand, filtering from less expensive units to more expensive units, rent prices stabilize/decrease). 5-10 years is a sizeable chunk of my life and I would strongly prefer to not have a 5-10 year chunk of my life with elevated rents due to airbnb listings.
      • bko 4y ago
        Apply this logic of maintaining the status quo historically. Imagine someone creates something to do (Y) with good X. Price of good X goes up due to increase demand. Consumers of good X lobby that this is bad and there should be laws to prevent good X to be used for Y. Also why are you optimizing for lower rents (as long as they are not AirBNB short term rentals)? What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property? Or the people that are coming to stay short term?
        • throwawaygh 4y ago
          > Also why are you optimizing for lower rents... What about the homeowners who benefit from having more things they can do with their property? Because basic shelter is WAY lower on the hierarchy of needs than rental income, and shelter is not a need that the US is adequately meeting even for its middle class.
• dheera 4y ago
  > tourism + wfh Can't you do that on a normal tourist visa? As long as you're not getting paid by a US company or to a US bank account, you're not employed in the US, so as long as your company allows you to be remote, I don't see an issue with it.
• mvkel 4y ago
  It's trivial to do this with Gusto and companies like CorpNet. We have employees in 13 states and it's all automated.
• Bombthecat 4y ago
  And i hope one day, we stop living in cities and only go there for culture, cinema, parties etc. I think this would help with keeping rent down! /s