"Just pay your employee to drive 3 hours" is equally absurd. Or what if I decide to take a greyhound or amtrak even longer, please pay me to sleep! You also have the choice of not taking the job, or not moving away from your job so its hardly a fair comparison.
You're thinking about this like an engineer instead of a human and not applying any sort of reasonableness test. You can take as long as you want to get to work but you'll be paid for a reasonable commute time and distance just like how mileage reimbursement and per diem works.
You think in the world of business travel someone hasn't already thought about this?
So then you don't actually get paid based on how long your commute is and the people stuck commuting 3 hours a day go uncompensated for the time because a 3 hour commute isn't reasonable -- which was the original point.
For simplicity we could just abstract that average commute and other factors(some days being busy or slow, some days having challenging/easy tasks, cost of living, etc.) and wrap that all up in a single compensation. Maybe call it a wage or salary, and then let workers choose the job with the best "wage" for their specific scenario.
But how are you supposed to set price controls on wages if some jobs are easy and right near where you live and others are hard and far away from affordable rents? Wouldn't the calculation have so many variables in it with such subjective valuation that only the person themselves could decide if it was worth it?
The moment you make commute a cost for the employer they're going to start discriminating based on your commute. You don't live within 5 minutes of the job? Go find another job.
Or better yet - employer offered housing! You don't want to live on the workplace-campus? Sorry! We need somebody to buy from all the businesses we contracted for our workplace campus.
