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Comment by YZF | Hacker News Reader

This has always been true though. The employee in the London or Tel Aviv or Bengalore or Toronto offices of Google (or any other company for that matter) are not paid the same $ amount for the same role/contribution.

Companies have always paid people "market value", never what they can afford to pay (which for some companies is less and other companies a lot more).

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When an employee's "market value" goes down, it does not warrant a pay cut though: the existing employment contract continues, and the value that the employee provides to the employer does not depend on the employment market.

Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it wants.

If a recession caused Google to run out of money, the pay cuts could be justified much better, but that's not the situation at hand.

I think the ethics (and legality?) of arbitrary pay cuts go hand in hand with arbitrary firings: cutting a salary to $1 is essentially the same as a firing. Legality then would logically depend on whether the employment contract is under a state jurisdiction with at-will employment or if there is a requirement of a just cause.

In the US, employment is generally at-will, which means either side can unilaterally terminate the agreement but either way, these are the people whose employment conditions presently include having to physically show up to work. So, there's no "existing employment contract" here either legally or morally - if want to change one side of the contract (from working in the office to working from home), then it's reasonable for the other side of the contract (compensation) to have to be renegotiated.

When I worked in home-office based companies previously (job with lots of travel to customer sites), they paid a flat rate no matter where you lived.

I quite like the philosophy of "this is our remote pay, if you want to move to Bentonville, AR and live like a king have at it, but if you want to live in Manhattan that's on you."

But that has as much to do with the relative skill level in those particular markets and constrained to living in those markets in a pre-remote centric world as it does higher cost of living in those areas.

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