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I understand it the way you meant it. There are zero bona-fide reasons that I cannot work at home. If my employer wants me to battle traffic an hour each way,

• tharkun__ 4y ago
  It seems like you still do not understand, despite the explanations and you are mis-characterizing my definition of work. You also seem to think that I'm siding with employers here. In fact it is the opposite. My "definition" of "Work" in an employer-employee relationship: Time my employer pays me for in which I perform something we agreed upon. Thus my commute was never work time. And because it was never work time, if I no longer commute to the office, they can't expect me to now work during the time frame that I used to commute. They can only expect me to work during the times of the commute that I actually worked. It's part of the (say that was the arrangement) 8 hours of work I did for them. Unless of course I was fortunate enough to have that last arrangement I mentioned, where yes, working on the commute was paid for. Take the 1.5 train commute again. Let's say 30 minutes of that was getting to the train station on time, waiting for the train to arrive and walking to work and thus of that I was able to work for one hour, because I was lucky enough to work for an employer where they do pay me for work regardless of where I am even in the "office times". Most people are not in that category. In fact, a lot of people do not even know how many hours they really put in. I can only recommend, if you don't track your hours, do so. Tracking hours is good for employees and bad for employers. Look at what your pay stub says, how many nominal hours you are working. That is your target. Try to stay close to that. EDIT: Forgot about the conferences and such. Of course the employer has to pay for that. It's work time. By only the nominal hours. If they make me represent them at some conference for 12 hours that's fine, I'll do that for that weekend or whatever, but I plunk down 12 hours in my "timesheet" and I don't work for a day or so the week after or some other time that I choose and I damn well expect hotel, transportation and food to be paid for.
• kelnos 4y ago
  > You're making an extremely narrow definition of "work" that your employer is delighted by. You're paying for the privilege of getting a paycheck. I'm saying that you aren't being paid for your time. I think you still aren't really understanding the person you're replying to. They're not saying that's the "definition of work"; they're merely -- correctly -- acknowledging that's the definition of work that nearly every employer imposes on employees. They're not saying that's a good thing, just accepting reality and trying to plan for it. Sure, some people may work as a contractor and have compensated commute time as a part of their contract. I think that's great, but it's also probably vanishingly rare, at least in the context of office work (I've never personally heard of this actually happening, but sure, it's possible, and probably exists). Not really sure how your "scenarios" are relevant to this. Yes, companies pay for employees to go to conferences, paying for their travel and lodging expenses, though often many companies can be pretty stingy and inflexible about this sort of thing too, setting cost limits that can make trip logistics challenging. And if a trip goes over the weekend, an employee isn't usually compensated for "overtime". And of course an employer would pay to ship needed equipment somewhere; what does that have to do with anything? But that really has nothing to do with employee commute time. The fact of the matter is that commute time is generally accepted to be something the employee has to bear, uncompensated. I don't think anyone is saying that's a good or fair thing, just that's how it is. > There are zero bona-fide reasons that I cannot work at home. If you find a company that's cool with that, awesome. Fortunately there are many more companies that are cool with that than there were in 2019. But many people still do not have that option; many employers are forcing employees back to an office, and still consider time-in-office to be the only valid "work time". That's sucks and isn't fair, but that's reality. Ignore it at your peril.
  • klyrs 4y ago
    > They're not saying that's the "definition of work"; they're merely -- correctly -- acknowledging that's the definition of work that nearly every employer imposes on employees. No, I get it. If you accept a definition of "work" that has you eating hours of overhead per day, you'll never negotiate a better deal. Don't accept it, at least not without a fight. I don't accept it.