Inside story: Why work from home could return Jacinta Allan to office

The first time Jacinta Allan outlined her plan to legislate a right to work from home beyond a small circle of trusted colleagues and advisers was, fittingly enough, on a Zoom meeting.

It was 10am on Friday, August 1, the day before the premier was due to speak at the Victorian Labor State Conference, where union delegates and rank-and-file members gathered to reflect on the federal government’s thumping re-election win and sharpen the party’s focus on the upcoming state poll.

Premier Jacinta Allan’s work-from-home policy has come under fire.Credit: Eddie Jim

Allan had already inserted the work-from-home pledge as the centrepiece of her speech. Whispers abounded that this year’s policy would steal the show. The Premier’s Private Office had ordered a custom backdrop for her press conference with the slogan “Work-from-home works” printed on Labor red.

But 24 hours before this political choreography was due to unfold, some of the government’s most senior ministers clicked into a hastily scheduled meeting of the Co-ordinating Ministers Committee of Cabinet (CMC) – which includes the lead minister responsible for each government department – knowing nothing about it.

What followed was less a debate than a box-tick so that Allan, if asked, could say the policy had gone through a cabinet process.

Several Labor figures say it was reminiscent of the leadership style of Daniel Andrews, who would stride into a cabinet meeting, take his seat and promptly declare, “Right. This is what we are doing ...”

Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny.Credit: Jason South

Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny and Treasurer and Industrial Relations Minister Jaclyn Symes had weeks earlier been brought into the premier’s circle of trust. Other ministers say working from home had been an ongoing policy discussion, but Friday was the first they’d been informed the government was about to announce plans to enshrine the right.

Kilkenny commissioned advice from an independent senior counsel on whether Victoria, a jurisdiction which 30 years ago ceded its powers over industrial relations to the Commonwealth, could legislate to give people a right to work from home two days a week.

The advice that came back was Victoria could do it through one of three ways: building on provisions that exist in the Equal Opportunity Act requiring employers to accept reasonable requests from employees for flexible work arrangements (including working from home), changing Occupational Health and Safety laws, or drafting standalone legislation enshrining a statutory WFH right.

All these options carry varying risks of legal challenge. A source familiar with the advice says the premier is clear where she wants to get to, but is undecided on the best legislative path. An unusually strong consensus of workplace law experts – from Stephen Smith and Andrew Stewart to Graeme Watson and Joellen Riley – believe all state-based options would fail a High Court challenge.

Symes drew on her previous experience as an industrial relations adviser to Rob Hulls, who as attorney-general in 2007 used the Equal Opportunity Act to give greater protections to people juggling work and care responsibilities. Her primary task now was to gain a better picture of current WFH practices across the public and private sectors and determine what the Allan plan would mean for productivity.

It is here that Allan’s WFH policy group discovered a rich vein of research by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, including a recent finding that people who work solely from home clock up 20 per cent more hours than those who don’t.

This statistic relates to an exception – people who work entirely from home – rather than the two-day rule the Victorian government is promising to legislate. This distinction was lost in the premier and treasurer’s broad claims at the state conference that working from home allows people to work 20 per cent more.

When Allan and Symes fronted the “Work-from-home works” backdrop a week ago to spruik their freshly announced policy, another Labor woman was standing off to one side, nodding in agreement. Her presence gave a strong clue about where the idea came from to legislate WFH rights.

This woman, Imogen Sturni, is the Australian Services Union branch secretary for the Victorian private sector. She represents clerical and administrative staff who do the unglamorous back-of-house work that keeps companies running. Since before the end of the pandemic, the union has been pushing for national WFH rights.

Sturni says national laws are still needed but the Victorian proposal is a start. She tells this masthead that, while working from home has become accepted practice, there are not enough legal protections against bosses issuing abrupt, return-to-the-office edicts. She says that without these, some workers – especially women with children – are stalked by a constant anxiety that their finely balanced work/home arrangements can at any point come crashing down.

Says Sturni: “People who have been working from home for years, with good managers and supportive businesses, who have set up their childcare arrangements and families and work days around work from home, they ask us, ‘What if we turn on our computers one day to an email saying everyone is back in the office full-time without exception?’”

Pollster Kos Samaras.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Former ALP campaign manager Kos Samaras says this anxiety is regularly expressed by people his Redbridge polling company surveys for their political views. “Hundreds, if not thousands of Australians we have interviewed have cited to us that working from home has enabled them to save on childcare, travel expenses and has been a lifesaver for their family budget,” he says. “For many, it has been the real difference between severe economic hardship and getting by.”

Headline-grabbing edicts by prominent companies requiring workers to return to the office full-time – Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Dell, AT&T and Starbucks in the United States and Tabcorp in Australia – while not reflective of broader employer sentiment, have fuelled the uncertainty among workers who rely on hybrid arrangements.

JPMorgan chief executive James Dimon made clear his views about working from home in leaked audio from a town hall meeting in February. “Don’t give me this shit that work-from-home Friday works,” he told employees of America’s biggest bank. “I call a lot of people on Friday and not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.” When Tabcorp chief and former AFL boss Gillon McLachlan issued his return-to-office edict in September last year, he said it was to build a “winning culture”.

Employer, business and property groups have lambasted, ridiculed and expressed alarm about the Victorian proposal. Their arguments are two-fold – that discussions between employers and employees, rather than government mandates, are the best way to set work-from-home arrangements, and provisions in the Fair Work Act already place an onus on bosses to accept reasonable requests for flexible work. An editorial in this masthead described Allan’s policy as an affront and a furphy.

Federal opposition spokesman for small business Tim Wilson has lashed out at Premier Jacinta Allan’s plan to enshrine out-of-office work arrangements in law. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Two senior government sources say the backlash against the policy was not only expected but welcomed within Allan’s inner circle. “It reminds me of the phrase you would always hear within Daniel Andrews’ office: ‘stakeholders aren’t voters’,” says one source. A second source says the policy announcement had echoes of another signature moment for Allan, when the premier ventured into Liberal-held Brighton to spruik her plans for higher-density housing across the suburbs. She was greeted with chants of shame from a group of locals led by shadow treasurer James Newbury and now-returned Goldstein Liberal MP Tim Wilson.

“One announcement was made in enemy territory, the other in front of the friendliest crowd a Labor premier could have, but they both were made with the full-eye realisation that there would be a counter-reaction,” the source says. The more vociferous that business groups are in their criticisms, the more they make the case that current work-from-home arrangements are at risk.

Victorian Labor’s popularity has recovered from the nadir contained in the Resolve Political Monitor surveys published by this masthead before the federal election. But Labor is still grappling with Allan’s persisting low popularity.

The work-from-home pledge, a political issue that has jumped from press release to conference speech and a genuine water-cooler debate, was designed to draw the Liberal Party into an unwanted fight. So far, Opposition Leader Brad Battin has refused to take the bait but Wilson, the only federal Liberal MP left in middle Melbourne, has lashed the WFH proposal as “professional apartheid”.

Michael Allen of Core Roasters in Brunswick.Credit: Simon Schluter

Michael Allen, owner of cafe Core Roasters in Brunswick, says his business is 20 to 30 per cent busier on Fridays compared with Wednesdays or Thursdays because more people are working from home.

“We have a bigger sort of pre-9am rush on a Friday where people are coming out because they’ve got the time to come and do this, rather than need to commute to work,” Allen says.

“They have their morning coffee here rather than at their regular [cafe] in the city … and then we might see them again in the afternoon when they go out for a walk.”

Allen says higher rates of working from home is beneficial for his business because it mostly serves residents in nearby houses and apartments. “As a space in the suburbs that’s focused around being here for our community of people, if our community people can be here a little bit more, that’s a huge benefit for us,” he says.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed Victoria’s plans to enshrine WFH in law at a press conference in Melbourne this week. Credit: Joe Armao

The world’s leading researcher on work from home, Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, says he is not aware of any other jurisdiction planning to legislate a WFH right, and predicts the announcement will resonate among suburban families. “Research shows that WFH promotes families and drives higher fertility rates,” he says. “I think Asian countries are going to slowly start mandating it for this reason. On this, Victoria is ahead of the curve.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese endorsed the Victorian government’s plans on Thursday but said changes to the Fair Work Act during the first term of his government provided stronger legal protections for people who wanted to work from home. This includes empowering the Fair Work Commission to arbitrate disputes about flexible work arrangements.

Committee for Economic Development of Australia economist James Brooks agrees the WFH debate has morphed into a broader culture war. US President Donald Trump, on the day of his inauguration, signed a directive ordering all heads of departments and agencies within the executive branch of government, to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements”. Earlier this year, then-opposition leader Peter Dutton sought to inject the issue into this year’s federal election campaign – with disastrous consequences.

In Australia, although the data shows the rate of working from home – a little over one-third of employees work at least one day a week away from the office – has stabilised since the pandemic, workers and their bosses are not on the same page about what this means for productivity.

Staff would have the right to work from home at least two days a week under proposed legislation.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Brooks explains that one of the features from WFH is that while individual workers are more productive at home, this does not necessarily benefit the companies they work for. When, as an employee, you shave an hour or two off your daily commute and still get all your work done, you are more productive. When, as a boss, you don’t consider the travel time of employees as work time and see only an empty office and an absence of collaboration, you don’t share in or appreciate the productivity gains.

An KPMG survey of CEOs found that in Australia, 82 per cent of bosses expect a full return to the office within the next three years. A study by the Australian HR Institute noted that the biggest pressure for return to the office tended to come from board directors and senior managers of companies, rather that the direct bosses of staff working from home. An emerging issue is quiet WFH, where chief executives and senior managers order staff back to the office but the edict is largely ignored.

This disconnect helps explain why today’s WFH conventions are inherently fragile. But for now, Brooks sees no evidence of a wholesale push by employers to bring their workers back to the office five days a week.

He offers a cautious response to the Victorian proposal. “We need to tread lightly and be clever about policy in this,” he says. “We would have said this issue should be left to employees and employers because every occupation and team is different but there is no denying this is now huge in the minds of households in Australia.”

For a third-term government looking for something to fight the next election on, working from home is also looming large.

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