"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
Say you have a startup in California and are thinking about hiring me remotely.<p>It&#x27;s completely ridiculous that you say &quot;Okay I&#x27;ll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt.&quot;<p>If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.<p>As someone who actually does live in the Rust Belt, it feels like these tech companies are saying &quot;Yeah we&#x27;re going to <i>actively try</i> to keep the wealth created by our business models concentrated in the coastal cities we like, and keep the rest of the country poor.&quot;<p>Thought experiment:  I have a friend in NYC.  I tell the company &quot;Yeah you should totally pay me $100k, I live in high-CoL area, $FriendsAddress is my NYC address.&quot;  Then I simply don&#x27;t tell anyone at the company I&#x27;m actually doing my job from somewhere in West Virginia or Indiana or Wisconsin.  How would the company even know the difference?  On the rare occasion the company or someone sends me some work-related postal mail, my friend can simply forward it to me.<p>In practice I wouldn&#x27;t do this.  I&#x27;d simply walk away from a company that uses this offensive hiring practice on me.