Vermont Wants To Pay Companies To Let Employees Work Remotely (fastcompany.com)

A proposal for an act in the Vermont legislature is actively trying to give grants to small companies to employ remote workers. From a report: Under the terms of S-0094, a $10,000 micro-grant will be given to a business that will "establish or enhance a facility that attracts small companies or remote workers, or both, including generator and maker spaces, co-working spaces, remote work hubs, and innovation spaces, with special emphasis on facilities that promote colocation of nonprofit, for-profit, and government entities."

Comments

Re: uh, what

[dgatwood]

Their options are to either spend $X for the space in downtown or spend ~$X for the space elsewhere, and the only difference is the grant to fund construction, which almost certainly won't cover the construction costs. No business will take advantage of this to let employees work closer to home. If businesses were interested in spreading out, they would have already done so. A few thousand dollars of seed money won't change that equation meaningfully, because a small, one-time grant can't balance out the ongoing pain of having some of your workers in a different location.

Instead, these grants will be used by people who were already going to build small offices. They'll take the free money to do what they were going to do anyway, and the only people who will benefit are the co-working space companies that refurbish the buildings.

And this is why government bureaucrats who have never worked in any business for a day in their lives should not try to come up with creative ways to solve businesses' problems. They'll fall victim to special interests and fail to solve the problem. Every. Time.