Suppose there are two employees: Alice and Bob, who do the same job at the same factory. Alice has a 10 minute (20RT) commute, Bob commutes 35 minutes(70RT).
If you’re the owner of the factory, would you compensate them for their commutes? How would you do it?
Commute obviously has an impact on overall satisfaction. In roles that can be done remote or in person you can effectively trade commute time for pay.
This logic can be extended to employees working in person with contrasting commute times. Thus op’s question
Sure, but it’s also entirely out of the employers hands, and creates a perverse incentive to live as far away as you’ll get paid for.
Most of an employees job has perverse incentives
You can surely see how “pay people to commute longer” is basically just an all around bad outcome to be promoting, for everyone involved really, no?
I don’t think anyone is successfully taking advantage of longer commute time for more pay.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, commute time is already factored in to employees compensation. This happens in a few ways but one of the ways it doesn’t happen is employees choosing to more farther away to make more money.