If a company is based in NYC, and has a branch in rural Ohio, are the Ohioans being exploited if they aren't paid as much as their NYC counterparts despite drastically reduced cost of living in rural Ohio?
If digital widget producers are worth $x to the company, and get paid 0.8x in one location and 0.4x in another location, I'm not sure why I'd regard that as anything other than exploitative.
CoL isn't really related to the market value of labour for remote-capable jobs; it would be similarly exploitative if the company paid childfree people, vegetarians, and basement apartment dwellers less because of their drastically reduced cost of living.
I could see a point for fairness if the salaries were scaled so that average post-CoL savings in different CoL areas were equal, particular within regions (e.g. a country) where people have freedom of movement.
I mean, it is. Wages are a market, thus supply and demand applies. We are not in a socialist society where there is some inherent "exploitation" which is basically what you're talking about.
I would assume you also believe that every single person working for a wage is also by definition exploiting regardless of where they are? Otherwise it would make very little sense...
I don’t know about the quality of those services. It might be that the company operates in a cruel trashy way. But if we call it a hypothetical, and stipulate that the company unilaterally extends worker protections approximately equal to American worker protections (and much more attractive than local protections), would that change the calculus?
It’s the same difficult work wherever it’s done. But in one context, it pays a really attractive wage and reflects good working conditions compared to the other options available to the worker. In the home context, the same wages would not provide a remotely adequate standard of living, and the worker has better options and should probably take them.
In that framework, isn’t it more humane to take the work where it does the most good for the people doing the job? For that matter, doesn’t it help raise the standards in the remote job market: when a company comes around that’s rich enough to offer workers the choice of a job with better protections, doesn’t that encourage local businesses to make their protections more attractive too?
