Who pays when we work from home?
The ACTU is keen for a charter to help cover costs like power and Wi-Fi for people working from home. Employers are not convinced.
Employers are opposing the union movement’s push for white-collar companies to compensate employees for work-related expenses incurred when working from home, warning it will jeopardise the co-operative approach embraced by business and the labour movement during the pandemic.
As human resources departments develop their post-lockdown WFH, the Australian Council of Trade Unions has unveiled what its secretary, Sally McManus, calls a “platform for the workers’ side of the negotiations”. Declaring that WFH should always be voluntary, the ACTU’s charter calls on employers to fund an upfront allowance, or provide full-cost reimbursement, for all work-related expenses incurred by working from home.
Citing its recent survey of 10,000 employees who worked from home during 2019, the ACTU says employees paid an average $530 each in additional expenses while working remotely. The charter proposes the employer-funded allowance cover all work-related expenses including water, electricity and gas, stationery, equipment, amenities, telephone and internet expenses.
“Working from home should not lead to cost shifting from employers to workers,” the charter says. “The cost of both one-off and recurring expenses that the employer would normally be responsible for on employer-provided premises should still be the responsibility of the employer when workers are working from home.”
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive James Pearson says the ACTU claim represents a “cash grab” by unions.
“Many employees value working from home, benefiting from reduced commute time, saving on transport costs, improved job satisfaction and increased flexibility to balance work and family responsibilities,” Pearson says. “The ACTU is trying to unbalance these arrangements by, on one hand, gifting employees a unilateral right to dictate they work from home and, on the other hand, forcing employers to pay for this choice. Spruiking an ‘allowance’ to work from home when people in businesses around the country are on their knees is taking advantage of the crisis to make unreasonable demands on those who can least afford it.”
Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox says a balanced discussion about costs to employees should take into account savings on petrol, parking, tolls and public transport that employees achieve when working from home. Willox notes that employees working from home are entitled to claim 80c per hour as a tax deduction.
But McManus says workers claiming these expenses on their tax return shifts the obligation away from employers.
“It really goes to the fact that you shouldn’t be out of pocket at all for doing work for your employer,” she tells The Deal. “Whose obligation is it to pay? Is it taxpayers or is it the employer? Obviously, they are saving a lot of money.”
Spirited debate
The upheaval in the way we work has generated spirited debate among policymakers globally. A research team at Deutsche Bank recently proposed employees pay a 5 per cent tax if they choose to keep working from home after the pandemic, with the revenue used to support low-income workers unable to work remotely.
In Australia, the emerging solutions for balancing the needs of capital and labour are far less radical. Apart from additional compensation, the ACTU charter proposes a body to ensure the “ethical” use of data collected about employees working from home, the appointment of union delegates to represent remote workers, and the ability to have disputes over remote work arbitrated.
Unions will initially seek agreement with employers in heavily unionised workplaces to implement the charter as company policy before seeking to have it incorporated into enterprise agreements when they are renegotiated.
McManus nominates the public sector, finance and general clerical, the major banks and other financial institutions as the white-collar employers to be targeted.
“Greater access to working from home could make life better for huge numbers of people but we have to make sure that it’s sustainable and properly supported,” she says. “The decision to work from home doesn’t mean you surrender your rights at work or your mental health. No one should be out of pocket, expected to work longer unpaid hours or not allowed to disconnect.”
Willox says the ACTU’s “adversarial approach” risks deterring businesses from accepting working-from-home arrangements.
“An employer who agrees to the ACTU’s charter would be committing to let all suitable workers work from home,” he says. “Employers need to maintain the right to require employees to work in offices and other workplaces, consistent with the operational requirements of their businesses.”
Willox says a significant proportion of white-collar employees want WFH at least part of the time, and employers are typically endeavouring to accommodate the needs of employees to the extent permitted by operational requirements.
“If unions start pursuing the ACTU charter in workplaces, this is likely to discourage employers from continuing with working from home arrangements once the pandemic is over,” he says. “There has been great co-operation over working from home and you’d hope that can continue as a hybrid model takes hold but, as usual, unions are seeking to impose centralised rigidities and constraints on employer/employee co-operation.”
New research
New research by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work finds the amount of unpaid overtime has risen in 2020, despite total work hours falling during the pandemic and many employees working from home. The average amount of unpaid work each week increased from 4.6 hours in 2019 to 5.25 hours in 2020, the equivalent of seven weeks of full-time work per person, per year. Seventy per cent of employees working from homes say they are doing at least some work in non-work hours, while one in five say their employers’ expectations of their availability has risen during the pandemic.
“For many, the reality is that working from home is more like living at work,” the centre’s economist, Dan Nahum, says. He says one-third of surveyed workers indicated that, post-COVID, they expected to work from home more. “Without adequate rules and protections this risks a further incursion of work into people’s personal time, poorer health and safety standards, and greater polarisation between those jobs that can be conducted from home and those that cannot,” Nahum says.
Pearson says hundreds of thousands of employers and employees have agreed to change how and where they work during the pandemic. Adopting the charter will give an employee the right to unilaterally declare they will work from home, regardless of employer needs, he says. Union officials will be able to “impose themselves” on WFH arrangements undertaken by non-union members, while employers risk losing their right to safeguard intellectual property and client confidentiality.
“This is not the time to be blind to the serious ongoing economic threat to jobs by calling for more money and placing more demands and restrictions on employers,” he says.