In a previous post, I argued that most rhetoric espoused by some of the f***muppets (i.e., a narrow group of PS who disseminate ill-informed opinions on blast and crowd out more productive conversations) doesn’t accurately reflect how wages and labour markets work, not even in the public service context. My original argument was that the PS combines three wage elements (reworded here for simplicity) that are already baked into wage rates:
- R — The “rack” rate, i.e., how much it costs for you to get out of bed;
- C1, C2, C3, C4, C5 — The commuting compensation to leave your house to go to a job site; and,
- L — the cost for actually expending energy to do the “physical” labour of the job.
I also apologized to academic specialists for renaming the elements and ignoring the long history of these elements, and to non-academics who will likely still find me too wordy.
What about C(ommute) costs?
As I outlined in my initial post, wages in the public sector agreements are based on rates that were in existence before widespread telework and the wages already had commuting costs baked in. They weren’t and aren’t generally visible, but they’re there.
And as I said above, there are some very important groups who go off the rails when sh**diots and f***muppets wrongly suggest that we should suddenly “start” getting a premium for RTO, when in fact, we are already paid for our commuting costs.… Read the rest
