In my opinion, I don’t think employees should be compensated for their commute. How an employee chooses to arrive to work and how far they live away from a company is not a responsibility of the company. Their job is to be ready to work when their shift starts.

However, this is an X-Y question. The overwhelming majority of jobs historically required you to show up to work. We didn’t consider paying for their commute unless they had to travel for work outside of commuting. This was never an issue.

You asked the “X” question, but the “Y” question (the question you’re probably asking) is how the burden of commuting should be handled for employees being asked to come in when they have been working remotely.

I think that there are many more nuances to this than simply compensation. If the employee has a working agreement with the company, and they have been managing their time with full-time remote hours, then they should consider that as part of the work agreement.

If they’re being asked to come in (when they would normally be WFH), that’s outside of the work agreement. It’s basically like being asked to get coffee for your boss or something. If it was advertised as part of the job, and you accepted it, then that’s fine. If you started work, and a year later, your boss asks you for daily coffee runs under the threat of being fired, that is not acceptable.

You have to keep in mind that the recent WFH popularity has challenged a lot of companies by making their own interests difficult. A lot of it is shitty stuff that the company doesn’t want to say out loud, like:

• They cannot walk around and micromanage you
• They cannot watch you work
• They don’t like the idea of taking breaks, even if you put in the same amount of work throughout the day
• They don’t have that corporate appearance of an office of business casual-dressed employees
• They have real estate they paid for that is sitting half-empty

This kind of thing. Realistically, from an employee perspective, they’re doing the same work, and they don’t see any issue hanging around their house in their pajamas. From a higher-up perspective at some companies, though, they don’t have the same goals.

It makes sense that a lot of employees are leaving their positions with companies forcing them to come into the office. In my opinion, they’re breaking their working agreement. It may not be written down and it may not be a legal difference, but there is no doubt that they’re radically changing the work requirements, which might not be what they signed up for. And what if you’re in a wheelchair?

Unfortunately, if Alice and Bob live in the US, there is hardly any hope for them if the company doesn’t have goodness in its heart. The workers’ rights laws in the US are almost non-existent. There are even about three dozen states that can even legally fire you for being gay. It’s that bad.

In my opinion, workers’ rights should be highlighted, and side effects like working agreements and compensation for commuting should be solved problems by proxy.