Most euro zone workers would not be willing to accept a pay cut to retain remote working opportunities, a European Central Bank survey found, confounding other studies which concluded that workers would forgo bigger chunks of their income.
The portion of Europeans working at least sometimes from home has doubled to 22% since 2019, even as firms are still debating and tweaking remote working policies.
“The average pay cut that employees would accept to work two or three days per week from home is 2.6%,” the ECB said in an Economic Bulletin article. “This is significantly lower than other estimates in the empirical literature.”
The ECB, which surveys ordinary consumers regularly, found that around 70% of employees would not be willing to accept any pay cut to work from home, 13% would accept a pay cut of between 1% and 5%, and 8% would accept a reduction of between 6% and 10%.
Its survey found that employees who work from home more frequently tend to be willing to accept a higher pay cut to preserve their current arrangement.
But even then, people who work fully remotely are only willing to accept a pay cut of 4.6%, the bank said.
(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
