The downstream impact of what you’re describing here is of a magnitude far greater than any additional compensation mileage would make up for from an employee standpoint — mileage is $.625/mile, that’s a few grand per year for most employees.

Let’s say all companies are required to pay a mileage stipend. Immediately:

• Admin costs have risen — we now need to calculate distance from the office, account for employee moving homes, logic to account for PTO, etc. Think the company is just going to eat those?

• Companies put in distance radius from the office as an auto-filter in job apps. Live 31 miles away instead of 29? Too bad, you just got auto-screened out and your resume never even hits the recruiter’s inbox.

• Housing market have you feeling down now? Get ready, because now you have to live within x miles to be considered for jobs. Awesome! You got an extra $5k in mileage for the year! Now you get to pay an extra 150% for your home!

• Run a small business in a rural location? Good for you! You now get to pay double the mileage that employers in bigger cities have to pay, because you can’t put a mileage radius cap on because your hiring pool of candidates is far smaller. And you get to do all of these new admin duties manually, because you can’t afford some fancy software to handle it. No worries! We’ll put in a caveat that small employers are exempt or pay less mileage, the little guys always win the lobbying wars after all!

• Your company is comprised of all positions that allow for only in person work (factories, hospitals, schools, etc). Too bad, you now get to pay these people to drive to your place of work. What’s that you say, we put in a caveat that positions that require in person work are exempt from paying mileage — cool, that works. Oh, what’s that, my software devs are now required to take out the trash each day, so of course they’re required to be in person, don’t need to pay that mileage now I guess!

• No worries, there will be plenty of companies that will take advantage of these new rules and use them as a competitive advantage. They’ll pay extra mileage and not mess with job duties so the employee will be able to choose the best ones — and we’re literally right back to where we are now.

It’s full circle, employees will choose the best places to work based upon their own needs. Hate in office work, and willing to sacrifice pay to get a WFH gig — cool. Cash is king to you and you’re willing to commute 3 hours each way to make it happen — also cool.

All we’re doing here is adding a ton of unneeded governmental controls that will eventually just benefit larger orgs that can absorb these costs, inevitably providing them additional power to lobby away the very rules that were put in place to begin with.

The answer to this is as simple as it’s always been — you vote with your actions. Don’t like an employer’s rules — don’t work there. Don’t like a business’s morals, practices, etc. — don’t give them your business. Enough people feel a certain way and you’ll see change, if not, sounds like your vote lost. Figure out how to move forward in life, not everyone has the same worldview and values and it’s up to you to figure out how to adapt.

We absolutely do not force companies to pay for time worked in all cases. Have you heard of a salaried employee? In the case of Meta, this is almost exclusively what we’re discussing here — and in the vast majority of WFH cases as well.

So in this utopia where all employers need to pay for you to get to their office, how far away is a reasonable commute? Do we now start to have federal restrictions around that? What if someone lives 5 mins away vs 60? What’s the limit? What if I want to commute 5 hours each way every day? They have to pay me for it?

Non-combative, serious note here, I get why everyone routinely points to the data surrounding productivity for WFH and agree with all of it, there’s a problem with it though — it’s massively skewed and we’re starting to see the flaws in it. The vast majority of the pop. from those studies have previous in office experience, particularly onboarding/training. We don’t have enough studies about fresh from school performance, we’re looking into them internally, and results are fairly off putting.

I work for a fully remote company that was previously closer to a hybrid model. We’ve been doing research into the onboarding, ramp up, and performance of new college grads with no previous in-office experience. Overall, they’re not performing as expected — to sum it up best, they float. Training costs have now gone up (more resources allocated for: pair programming, being ‘available’ to simulate the over the cubicle “hey quick question” kind of stuff, longer onboarding timeframes). It’s working, but guess what, it kinda sucks. Makes me not want to waste time on younger hires (which is the opposite of my hiring preferences in the past).

I can totally see why C suite are getting sick of this stuff. Again, I’m not going back in office myself ever, but that might mean switching companies at some point to stay WFH— and that’s my decision to be able to make.

But you are making a choice to work for them — no one if forcing you to do so. Don’t like the conditions of employment, don’t work there. No different than a company having a bad 401k contribution or PTO policy. Also, Meta isn’t worried about a few people bitching about gas money. Go check out Blind to see the vast line of people that would donate a kidney to get in there. Now, smaller regional companies, sure this could be a nice benefit.

I’m full time remote and would not want to go back anytime soon — but I also don’t apply to jobs that are listed as being in person or hybrid. Just the same as I don’t apply to jobs that are in other countries, other professions, etc.

Now, companies changing WFH policy sucks — ie hired full time remote and being told now they have to come in to the office — but, job conditions change all the time and as an at-will employee, it’s my choice whether those changes are worth leaving the company. Companies suck, make your choices accordingly and stop hoping they’ll do the ‘right’ thing you think they should do.