Working from home’s now a culture war, and Dutton’s drawn the battle lines

Even as I take advantage of it, I do sometimes wonder if the working-from-home revolution is a pure victory for women. Greater workplace flexibility has undoubtedly allowed us to juggle more, but sometimes it seems the result has been that … we just juggle even more.

I wonder if working from home actually increases women’s emotional labour – the great invisible burden that we carry inside our heads, the running list of things we must do and remember.

Does working from home actually increase women’s emotional labour?Credit: Getty Images

At any given time, this list comprises a grab-bag of homework supervision/pet worming/soccer schedules/what to do with kids during school holidays/booking after-school care/organising birthday parties/organising presents for other kids’ birthday parties, and, my personal non-favourite, finding an outfit for the Book Week parade (a week, that, in our household, is sometimes accompanied by a parental expletive, notwithstanding our abiding love for books).

The emotional labour has always been there, but previously, it was easier to compartmentalise. The post-pandemic ability to work from home creates a constant bleed between home/family life, meaning you rarely get a true break from either.

Those of us still traumatised by the home-school-plus-work hellscape of the lockdowns would very happily never Zoom again.

I love going into the office – it’s more fun, it’s more social, and they give us chocolates and cake. I like being part of the sea of humanity that joins the daily commute. And the benefits of in-person collaboration and knowledge-exchange are incalculable.

Whatever your personal preference, and whatever its cons and pros, working from home seems to be morphing into a football for the culture wars. Broadly speaking, the right, with its boss-and-business focus, is lining up on the side of “forcing” workers back into the office. The left, with its interest in the rights of working people, and particularly women workers, is lining up on the WFH side.

Sniffing the zeitgeist, this week the opposition announced it would force public servants back into the office five days a week. As reported in the Australian Financial Review, opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume told the Menzies Research Centre that Labor had turned working from home into “a right for the individual, not an arrangement that works for all”.

A Coalition government would expect all public servants to work from the office five days a week, with exceptions “where they work for everyone rather than be enforced on teams by an individual”.

When asked about the plan, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton reached for hyperbole – public servants on salaries of more than $200,000 a year were “refusing” to go into the office, he claimed.

Working from home is turning into a football for the culture wars. Credit: Simon Letch

Parts of the public service do have startlingly high rates of people who work wholly remotely.

But it remains unclear whether the Coalition will be able to enforce this edict in the short term. In a wages deal struck in 2023, the Albanese government granted the Commonwealth Public Service Union the right to uncapped WFH days, with the employer obliged to adopt a bias to approving requests to work from home. Employees have the right to appeal against any refusals from their employer.

That agreement does not expire until 2027, but when it does, the Coalition would seek to change the terms, so the default for federal public servants is they work from the office five days a week, while having the right to request working from home where it is convenient for both employer and employee.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher criticised the policy, framing it as an attack on working women. She accused the Coalition of having no idea how modern families operate.

“They don’t have women’s interests at heart. They don’t see [work from home] as a central economic driver of growth,” she said. “Women have a right to feel at risk.”

Peppered with questions about the gender angle to his WFH edict, Dutton gave a rather woeful response.

He said that for women who could not make it into the office five days a week there were “plenty of job-sharing arrangements”.

He seemed to be suggesting that women working full-time could just drop back to a few days a week.

In which case, oh dear.

Does the opposition leader think work is a fun hobby for women, one that we can dial up and dial down, as per our whim? Perhaps realising his error, Dutton then seemed to walk back the stridency of the policy, saying it was a commonsense approach, and the main goal was to catch the refusenik public servants who never come into the office. Hume herself on Wednesday said “no one is banning work from home arrangements, that is a Labor lie”.

The issue has become thoroughly politicised, interwoven as it is with the Coalition’s pledge to cut the public service.

Albanese accused Dutton of stealing the public service cuts idea from US President Donald Trump, whose manic “efficiency” stooge Elon Musk is massacring the US civil service with nothing but dumb ideology guiding his efforts.

But actually, culling the public service is an oft-repeated pledge of the Coalition, and it must enjoy voter support, given the Coalition is elected more frequently than Labor.

But amid the politicking – some facts.

Working-from-home arrangements have undoubtedly been a boon for women and for Australia’s economic growth.

As Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood told the AFR’s Business Summit this week: “We have seen, in the last two years, the increase in women working full-time is bigger than the 40 years prior. I don’t think we can ignore those benefits.”

Pre-COVID, about 60 or 61 per cent of Australian women worked (outside the home), compared to about 71 per cent of men. During and post-COVID, in a tight labour market, women’s workforce participation has risen to about 63 per cent, while men’s has stayed constant.

Does that mean it’s beneficial to employees to work from home five days a week? Of course not. Women juggling domestic and office work run the risk of both kinds of effort being invisible if they never show up in the office. They are less likely to be promoted or to be awarded pay rises if they’re not physically in front of their bosses.

There is a reason employers don’t want their workers fully remote. Wood said economic research showed working remotely five days a week hurt productivity.

The “hybrid” model of working three days in the office and two days at home seems to be the “sweet spot”, she said, i.e., productivity is either negligibly less, or slightly enhanced with hybrid working.

But beyond that, there are “the broader benefits to the employees that flexibility brings”.

These benefits, of course, apply equally to men and women.

The working-from-home habit that emerged from COVID was a stealth social revolution, remarkable in its scale and stickability. Unions might have spent decades lobbying for it and never gotten anywhere, but a global catastrophe delivered it swiftly. It has handed power from employers to employees, and it’s unsurprising many employers are uncomfortable with that.

But the working-from-home revolution has more women working, and it has more workers, male and female, engaged in family care alongside work.

Working from home works. The model may be in for a market correction, but it is here to stay. I suspect all sensible politicians know that, especially since they have pioneered the model themselves.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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