Why is payment tied to location anyway?

It never made sense to me that companies tie the payment to the location where the employee lives.

If anything, discourages top talent from applying to the job openings of said company, because the practice seems discriminatory.

The boss of where I used to work he once told me: "The wages are ZIP-tied." (as in, per ZIP Code related); I asked him why, but he was not able to explain, he attached himself to it like an old adage you don't need to think about or challenge from time to time.

Posts like [0] make me think why isn't this the rule, rather than what it seems an exception.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31601926

1 comment

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keikobadthebad 4y ago ↗

In the past, jobs were generally onsite at offices or factories. So those sites had to pay local rates to get staff.

Since the Internet and then Covid more jobs are detached from specific sites, for those jobs it's becoming untenable to continue to pretend they must be done from a specific site because the management don't have the skills to run people async.

This is a double-edged sword. When places go properly async, your assumptions too about cultural and geographical advantages lose their grip. Rates everywhere might tend towards rates in, eg, India or China.