Businesses Are Paying Employees Less For Working From Home

Plus, two other things I learned this week

Nick Baker
Two Minute Madness
2 min readJan 12, 2021

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colorful mail box, dad working from home, mount Everest
Images By Nikolay Tchaouchev, Jimmy Dean, Kabita Darlami

This week I highlight three time-relevant pieces of information. Which is to say, I avoided sharing any of the historical facts that often catch my eye. But, I do get slightly emotional (mostly internally) in the first section covering employee pay.

Businesses Taking Advantage of Work From Home Employees

A trend (albeit early) has begun of businesses trying to pay their employees less if they choose to work from home full-time and move to a less expensive city. Most things that I learn and share here are interesting and sometimes uplifting. This one is upsetting.

Not only are businesses learning there are natural cost-savings in having employees work from home, but they’re now trying to take advantage of a global health pandemic to cut worker pay while expecting the same amount of work.

Air Mail

Passenger airplanes carry much more than people on business trips or vacations. They carry roughly half of all letters/packages that travel by air. This clearly became a problem at the start of COVID when fewer people flew, but planes had to continue flying with minimal passengers, sometimes even empty.

This, to my surprise, came up during a podcast episode with Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants. For pro-labor analysis, she’s a great follow on Twitter.

Mountains Can Change Height

Just recently, it became official that Mount Everest got even taller because of moving tectonic plates. Earthquakes can make mountains shorter.

Even though the change in height is what made headlines, I’ve also learned there are many different ways to measure a mountain's height. Mountains can be measured from the earth’s core, from the base of the mountain, or sea level.

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