AIBU to think if your boss wants you in the office, they should help pay to get you there?

You couldn’t make it up 😂

Also, most in the front office at Barclays will have to be in 5 days for reg reasons. So the people taking advantage of wfh will be the back office who are generally less well paid but also seen as expendable

It's part of the job. Why take a job if you can't get to the place of work

Or to think if an employee wants a job they should get themselves to their work place. Jesus where have we gone wrong, what a shocking attitude to work!

Did his salary reduce when his commute did?

This is ridiculous. Why did WFH in an emergency situation make so many feel entitled to do so forever more? Imagine if hospital, school and care staff started demanding expenses for their commute!

You do get paid for commuting to work. It's called wages. Where you choose to live in relation to your place of employment and therefore your commuting costs are up to you.

Your job in life is to get to work on the day you have to be in work. If you can’t you find a job you can get to.

Paying tax on it is still far, far below the actual cost of commuting though.

Presumably they were aware of the terms and conditions of that job requiring them to be on site so not comparable.

The issue is, people employed in the years after Covid may have accepted jobs that are 2 days in the office so suddenly changing them to 3 days is a change or a miss sold job. In those circumstances I think covering expenses is fair. Just because we all used to commute 5 days a week doesn’t mean someone on a predominantly wfh agreement should be screwed over.

OP, when you think about the people who do real jobs that involve building and manufacturing things, instead of playing with fake numbers on a spreadsheet in the fake "financial" sector, how do you think those people get to work? How do you think things would get built or manufactured without people on site? Or are you one of those people who thinks that things just magically come out of a machine when some guy presses a big button?

As others say it depends on the contract. My last job I had a remote contract plus the office was 200 miles away so if I did have to go in then they paid my expenses. My current job is hybrid minimum 2 days in the office but if they told me it was going to have to be 3 I reckon I’d need to just suck it up.

Thing is yes it does cost money but the truth is loads of us commuted a lot more before Covid and we got the benefit of not having to pay for a commute when companies went remote/hybrid then

I love WFH, but obviously it is the employee's responsibility to get into work as often as is required in their contract, and that includes paying any transportation costs. They can try to renegotiate with their employer (for either higher pay or fewer days in the office), but ultimately the employee should pay their own way or find a different job that better suits their wishes.

well, nobody argued their pay should be cut when they started wfh, to reflect their lack of commuting costs- which was entirely reasonable because commuting costs are not your employers concern (whether they are £0 or ££££).

It’s a bit much to expect your employer to pay your travel costs- that’s for you to consider when you take or stay in a job. Don’t want commuting costs? Then choose a job where you can walk or cycle to work, or one where you work from home. If you can’t find one, move somewhere you can, or reassess your choices based on what is possible.

I think what’s somewhat unreasonable about employers insisting on coming in more is that they fully took advantage of location agnostic hiring when working from home was the thing. Now it’s become obvious that it’s not all it was cracked up to be, they’re wanting those same employees to come in several days a week and it’s often not financially feasible. Obviously unless home was the contractual work location the employees haven’t got a leg to stand on.

I’ve never heard such utter nonsense in my life.

Yep. I know another company who have done this

my boss was very clear to us that if we want to protect our jobs we need to attend the office as we don’t want management thinking that someone offshore can do the role - and we are in a very specialist role. I’m seeing a lot of people being made redundant and training their offshore replacements before they leave

Pre covid my employer offered an interest free loan to cover a rail pass so people could buy a cheaper annual pass and spread the cost.

I guess one issue my colleagues who rely on trains had post covid was that the number of trains an hour were cut so if everyone suddenly had to go back full time the trains wouldn’t have the capacity

my morning commute on the tube can be a squash and a squeeze too

Plus Barclays is off-shoring and ramping up on AI so cutting back on their London staff, this way they won't need to pay them redundancy.

So work in the town you live in?

Joke isn’t it? People have become very entitled since the pandemic.

Would be totally reasonable to expect a pay rise to travel to work if you got a pay cut when you started to WFH which was attributed to the savings in travel costs.

But no-one did, so no. It's not reasonable.

Whether companies might choose to offer a (taxable) benefit to encourage RTW is another thing but I can't see many doing it if they have a right to enforce your contractual requirement to attend work.

I live in Essex, less than an hour from central London by train, 2 days a week by rail including travelcard for underground is £785 a month plus over £10 a day for parking say another £100, thats almost £900 a month for two days - three days would take it over a grand a month.

Employers have been slow to work out what "normal" looks like after Covid.

So, employees have got used to wfh completely or wfh for a certain number of days a week. Increasing the number of days in the office is suddenly a cost they weren't expecting. But, if their contract says they should be in the office every day (as many did pre-Covid) or has some words such as "as required" then they don't have a choice about it. They should consider the times they didn't have to pay for commuting as a bonus, rather than now having to increase office days as an extra.