Cost of working from home is still unclear

Pay equity has become an important issue in California employment law. It is now a concept of both general fairness and discrimination. For example, employers may not ask about prior salary history because it has been linked to discriminatory factors and reliance on it perpetuates that discrimination. Similarly, the California Equal Pay Act (EPA) requires employers to set benchmark pay scales for jobs to ensure people of different genders or ethnicities aren’t subjected to differential pay for the same job.

The EPA isn’t clear on whether an employer can have different pay scales for the same job based on geographical differences. While a $4,000-a-month job may pay well given Stockton’s cost of living, the same doesn’t hold true for an employee working in San Francisco. But now there are two new factors at play: not only whether an employee works from home but also where he or she works at home.

In the current employees’ job market, where there are many more jobs than candidates to fill them, the ability to work fully or partially remotely has become more than a perk; it’s now a demand. Certainly, remote work has a parade of attractive advantages, but perhaps not without a cost.

Some employees would pay to continue remote work