Why where you work is the new political battleground

The debate over work from home is rapidly becoming a war over the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of Australians.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are already engaged in the battles playing out every day in the nation’s homes, along its congested roads, in trains and trams filled to the brim and in expensive but increasingly empty workplaces.

One-third of us work from home at least some of the time.Credit: iStock

The Coalition, with plans to axe up to 36,000 federal public servants, wants all bureaucrats back at their work stations, with Dutton accusing many of “refusing to go back to work”. It’s part of its assault on everything “Canberra”, even if less than half of all public servants live in the nation’s capital.

Labor is stretching the Coalition’s position on public servants to the working rights of all Australians. At the weekend, it claimed forcing people back into their cars to make a daily commute into the office would set them back up to $5000 a year just in transport and car parking costs.

Debate among business leaders and economists over work-from-home has accelerated since the pandemic upended traditional approaches to work.

The recent HILDA survey – a long-term survey of Australian households that tracks how we live – confirmed about a third of us work at home at least part of the time each week. It was about a quarter of the population before COVID.

Before the pandemic, about 6.5 per cent of Australians worked at least half the time from home. It’s now about 17 per cent.

While public servants are in Dutton’s crosshairs, the survey showed the highest proportion of people who work from home are those in financial and insurance services, which is almost solely made up of private firms. Here, the proportion is more than four in five people working from the home office during the work week.

Information media and telecommunications has the second-highest rate (72 per cent), while the public sector comes in third (50 per cent).

The lift in work-from-home has been linked by some economists, business leaders and policymakers to the drop in national productivity, arguing the absence of people in the office reduces the ability of firms to generate new ideas.

But they are only looking at falling productivity from the perspective of the workplace. That argument is all about the eight or nine hours that businesses have their staff at their desks or in meeting rooms and the output of these people.

What happens outside those hours, including the time it takes to get to work, isn’t part of the equation for employers.

But those 15 or 16 hours away from the workplace means a hell of a lot to the individual.

For want of a better term, the “life productivity” of a person trapped in a car or a train for hours every week is not measured in a business bottom line. Nor is the time spent doing the laundry or waiting for a tradie to fix the broken dishwasher or the missed school play.

Those who ignore this tension – between business productivity and the life productivity of workers – are destined to lose the broader culture war over work-from-home.

Traffic congestion: One thing many work-from-home staff are trying to avoid.Credit: Scott McNaughton

Research by a team of Stanford University academics released last month highlighted the dangers of demanding a one-shoe-fits-all approach to the issue.

It found workers in their 30s had a work-from-home desire almost 12 percentage points higher than someone in their 60s. In other words, there’s a generational and lived-experience divide.

We know women, still carrying child-rearing responsibilities in most families, are more likely to support work from home. Among workers with children under eight, the desire to work at home is 7 percentage points higher.

Men who have young children have a work-from-home desire rate 3.6 percentage points higher than men who don’t have kids.

The Productivity Commission estimated in 2021 that traffic congestion would cost Australians about $35 billion by the end of the decade. That’s congestion largely incurred by people driving to their jobs and includes all that wasted time sitting in car parks that masquerade as roads.

The commission did not, however, take in the cost to the non-work lives of all Australians.

That’s the battle that will be played out between Albanese and Dutton in coming weeks as they seek to secure your vote.

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