How will more corporate acceptance of remote work play out?

I'm in a big city, but my company is fully remote. My salary is already on the high end for my city.

I see a lot of people concerned about wages going down. I suspect wages will go UP for most people as we're no longer trapped working with companies in our cities. There might be some slight downward pressure at big tech as people leave the bay for less expensive locales and are willing to accept less money to work at those companies if they get to stay in, say, Texas or other cheaper locales.

But in my opinion this is the greatest opportunity for workers in history - your options for employment are now unlimited. Companies are going to have to compete a lot harder to get the best talent when they now have to compete with every other company in the world. I've seen some suggest that the opposite would be true - companies can now get employees from anywhere. While true, companies have always had more power to hire from wherever they want - it's always been much harder as an individual to pick up and move your family across the country. You'll probably find it easier to get remote contracting work, too.

I expect this will cause some downward pressure on bigger city property values. Might cause a slight uptick for smaller cities and suburban areas. Rural areas might not have good enough internet yet and are spacious enough that they won't be very affected.

I’d be curious about the potential for remote work in somewhere like NW or even central Mexico for remote positions? It would be possible to use zoom meetings for most things and when Covid is over it’s not that far from most places on the west coast. I’d think this would be a much better alternative to Eeu/Russia/India.

There are of course the cartels which need to be dealt with.

Workers on vias, H1Bs aren't really affected by remote work too much. They are affected by the rules that the administration has put in place around them. Visas are not being issued currently (I've got one co-worker stranded in his home country when he was getting ready to do his final GC interview). This really means that individuals on existing visas won't move jobs, foreign students graduating won't be able to get jobs within the US, and foreign citizens won't be able to get jobs within the US. Essentially, a significant portion of engineers in the hiring pool are no longer available. This may result in high engineer pay, although that's probably cancelled out by the number of companies who've had to do large layoffs.

I think there will be some interesting dynamics between states.

Look at places like Florida or Texas without income tax, they are going to be able to draw away workers from states with higher income taxes.

This will create some revenue issues for states that rely on higher income taxes. I believe this will put further pressure on businesses and others that cannot perform work remotely.

well FB just announced that engineers keen on moving out of CA will get salary adjustments. Itd be silly to think you can move to rural Idaho and keep your 500k/yr TC

The game will shift to a competition among state and local government policies. We already know how this game ends. More profit for corporate; less rights for the workforce.

bad news for equal opportunity in hiring

I may add to this list:

Workers mental health?

Workers standard of living?