Frustrated Ex-Remote Worker, Who Was Forced to Work From the Office 3 Days a Week in Return-to-Office Mandate, Demands Their Employer Cover Their Cost of Commuting—Employer’s Response Offers Little to Help: ‘It Costs Me 90 Minutes a Day and $190 a Month'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Aug 12, 2026 9:30 PM EDT

Culturally, a commute was something that we had come to accept as a part of our working lives. But now, does the workforce accept commuting as a "requirement"? Or do we take exception to that idea?

This employee shared how they went to HR and demanded they be compensated for their time and cost of commuting into the office after their employer pushed a Return to Office mandate that forced them into the office 3 days a week, where they had previously been employed as full-time remote.

It's funny that commuting started off as a positive thing for workers who, in the 1880s after the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, were finally able to separate their lives from the dismal, soot-covered industrial sectors where they worked. This must have been, literally, a breath of fresh air for them and their families, as they were now able to take a horse-drawn streetcar and, later, a steam train or cable car, to their work and then home again. They didn't have to spend their entire lives among the pollution, now only their working hours. And their families no longer had to go to these areas at all, making a better future for their children.

We now know worker mass transit today simply as "commuting." And while commuting from a comfortable suburb into the city still presents a lifestyle choice, we now bear the cost of that choice begrudgingly and with frustration.

We now associate commuting, not with the opportunity to be further away from our work and where we do it, but as a major inconvenience. All that time you could be at home with your family, instead spent cramped on a bus or subway full of complete strangeers doing our best not to make eye contact, or sitting in gridlocked traffic as all the drivers around us lay into their horns like a scream into the void, while also trying not to make eye conactFor years, the workforce, namely those with jobs on laptops, shifting cells in spreadsheets and flinging emails onto the next person's inbox.

But parents will make the sacrifice this time and sanity for the quiet, boring, predictable security of the suburbs for their families.

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An employee covered in sticky notes, each one with a stressor written on it, representing the employee in the story's predicament.
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"I asked my company to pay for the commute they now require and the answer taught me exactly what they think my time is worth"

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Something else changed, though, too, that has spurred this frustration: Technology has changed.
We no longer need to go anywhere to do our work. Managers everywhere spent decades insisting that computers and modern communication technology weren't enough for employees to work from home. Even after every computer became a laptop that workers had to take home anyways, and every laptop had a 1080p video camera. And every home got DSL or fiber internet.
They still insisted that workers come into offices for "the culture" simply for their own comfort and proximity. Until, finally, we got proof in the last 5 years that this wasn't the case. Not only was remote work or flexible work possible. It was possible, it was efficient, and it worked.
But "Return to Office" mandates happened anyway. For a myriad of reasons.
And, now, for many of us who might have worked at home on our laptops quite productively and successfully for the last 5 years, going into the office presents a considerable time investment we need not make, and an unnecessary cost that we find ourselves wondering if we should be the one bearing.
And what for? Just so we can go into an office and spend all of our time on video calls with other offices anyway? So that our bosses can be more comfortable with having us in their line of sight?
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