Not sure it would be bizarre to have to work UK hours to fit in with the UK office! The work needs to be done in a timely fashion. IME there’s a lot more emphasis on presence and contracted hours and more bureaucracy surrounding employment. I’m sure there must be digital nomads working remotely and dialing in here from other countries, but I suspect they’re in a different class altogether and not necessarily asking questions here on AAM. It’s a situation that is WAY more than the sum of its parts.
Working between coasts in the US is still going to have a cultural fit and the employer would anticipate the needs of a remote US employee. The gulf between UK and US cultures is wider than the Atlantic, and what looks good on paper — better legal social safety net, better legal leave policies — are not that fun in reality. ISTM, working in the UK and reading the predominantly US experiences here, there’s a trade-off in generosity and flexibility as well as a massive pay gap. The biggest issue would be how an employer goes about proving you have a right to work in the UK when you’re not based there, and you will pay not into the US social security system but into ours, which would render everything you might get from the social systems here other than leave policies a bit meaningless.
Get a feel for employment rights by looking up the .gov.uk website and reading through. For every advantage of the UK system, there are either two disadvantages, or the law itself is less favourable in reality than in theory.
We also have a much different policy on pay here. The exempt/non-exempt division is non-existent and there are no specific laws on overtime; most people in practice take any such time as Time Off In Lieu. Income from employment is taxed at source as a matter of public policy so I’m not sure how you’d go about reclaiming what you’ve paid to the UK government to give to the American government, or whether you’d be taxed double etc etc etc. (It does mean it’s harder to hide a second job from payroll though.)
IME we’re less flexible with things like annual leave and sick leave; the idea that you could even ask ‘do I have to take this as PTO?’ is pretty laughable. Sick leave has a lot of laws governing it as regards occupational health; your manager is expected to check in with you/you with them while out, and you need fit notes to certify absences over a certain length /by law/ in order for your employer to claim minimum statutory pay, which is itself derisory. You are expected to report the reason for sickness on your return to work, again to track issues with occupational health. Employers must address absences on a case by case basis even if, like my org, there’s an instance system in play, but they can make that decision on what’s best for the company rather than for you.
The main difference I can see is when Americans come here, the pay rates surprise them a lot. We’re not paid enough to cover US costs for e.g. healthcare etc, and you pay into a different social security/national insurance/pension system. The company won’t necessarily offer health insurance because the UK system is socialised and although in theory you’d be paying into it through our National Insurance tax, you’d not be able to access it as a non-resident. Resident non-citizens are charged to use it — not a heck of a lot, but still some. Health insurance in the UK is available but is a very different situation, and would mostly again apply to local treatment centres etc.
I’m just not sure why you’d take the inconvenience and comparatively low pay of a UK job when you’d still be living in the US with it’s higher cost of living and healthcare. Even if you were telecommuting to Hawaii from Massachusetts, you’re still working within the specific economic, political and federal legal system, and we all understand the difficulties of residents of one state being employed by another. IME of American expats their expectations are out of sync with the culture, and that’s when they live here.
I’m struggling to see this working long term for OP. While cross-Atlantic trade might be ok (e.g. someone writing content for a US outfit or selling a book through an American agent; I had to go through a rather onerous process to list a self-published book on Amazon that involved a lot of abbreviations I can’t remember), it wouldn’t be very compatible with remote work, not just for expectations about time zones (and since the UK is all in the same zone, we aren’t used to dealing with it as much on a routine basis) but for all the other practicalities of cross-border working. And that’s before you start discussing things like whether you have the right to work in the UK if your butt has not left Connecticut, and that like me trying to emigrate to the US, we have similar sorts of ‘could a local do this job’.
Time zones are the LEAST of anyone’s worries. Never say never, but it would be like me bringing my UK plugs over here and trying to fit them into a US socket without an adapter (thank god for direct USB ports being fitted in sockets though). Probably not going to work at all, and even if you found a way to do it, you might start a fire.
