That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.

> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.

At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.

But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.

> What if you are not?

Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:

> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?

A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.

Offices have traditionally been in cities.

> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?

This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?

They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.

> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.

You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.

> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.

It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.