> If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less.
This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market, with the tacit assumption that the total revenue generated by your employment will exceed the total cost of your salary & other costs over the course of your career.
Let's say you get paid $100/hr for 8 hours per day of work, or $800/day. Now let's say you have to commute an hour round trip to and from work. Since you need to commute to get paid, it takes you 9 hours to earn that $800. Thus your real hourly wage is $88.89/hr. The person who doesn't need to commute works no harder, but it only takes them 8 hours to earn the same wage. They effectively have an 11% higher wage than the commuter, all else being equal. They could work for $95/hr, making them the more attractive option for the employer, while still being better off than the commuter.
> This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market...
Location based adjustments are replacing this misunderstanding with a different misunderstanding which is roughly "The market rate for the position is determined by where *the employee* lives, not by the many others elsewhere that would be qualified by the job"
This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market, with the tacit assumption that the total revenue generated by your employment will exceed the total cost of your salary & other costs over the course of your career.