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Google employees who decide to work from home full time could face pay cuts depending on where they live.
The GOOGL Alphabet,
The tech giant developed an in-house salary calculator, which Reuters was able to refer to, that determines how Google employees would be paid based on where they work. The calculator allows employees to learn how their decision to work remotely might impact their pay depending on where they live and / or where they can relocate.
And employees who choose to work from home permanently instead of returning to the company office could receive lower wages. Particularly such pay cuts would occur if the employee decided to stay away and move to a cheaper area away from the office where they would work in person.
For example, an employee who normally works at the Google office in New York would not be penalized if he worked permanently from home in the Big Apple, but he would like get paid less if they move to North Carolina or Virginia and telecommute.
But in some cases, workers who already live far from a Google office could also experience a pay cut if they decide to start working from home full-time rather than continue to make long commutes. Reuters viewed screenshots of Google’s wage calculator and reported that a worker living in Stamford, Connecticut – which is an hour from New York by train – would be paid 15% less if he worked at residence. Yet a colleague in the same office who lived in town wouldn’t receive the same pay cut if he switched to remote work. Other screenshots also showed differences of 5% and 10% between remote and in-person workers in the Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco areas. In fact, employees could see a pay cut of up to 25%, depending on where they decide to live.
Google was not immediately available for comment. “Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on an employee’s workplace,” a Google spokesperson told Reuters.
Related: Are teleworkers more replaceable than teleworkers? Managers say yes
Google has more than 135,000 employees worldwide, and CEO Sundar Pichai said in April that the company expects 20% of its workforce to be removed by this fall. It is not clear at this time whether the potential pay cut for employees seen in the internal calculator is for U.S.-based workers or the company’s global workforce.
The question of whether remote workers should see lower wages has been a hot topic many businesses have faced since the COVID-19 pandemic forced many employees to work from home. Twitter TWTR and Facebook FB have slashed wages for home-based workers who have moved to cheaper parts of the country.
See also: Can my employer get me vaccinated?
Morgan Stanley MS,
CEO James Gorman recently said he wants workers to return to the office or face pay cuts.
“If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can walk into the office,” he said. “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York. None of that, “I’m in Colorado and I work in New York and I get paid like I’m sitting in New York.”
On the flip side, tech companies like Reddit and Zillow ZG haven’t adjusted wages for remote workers.
Deciding when and how to get workers back to the office has also become complicated by new spikes in COVID-19 cases due to the contagious delta variant. Twitter TWTR, -0.33% recently closed its recently reopened offices in San Francisco and New York City due to a spike in COVID. And companies like Google, Disney DIS and Uber UBER have asked their employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine before returning to work in person.
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