Reconsider working from home

The Fair Work Commission must tread carefully in its examination of the right of clerical workers to work from home. The commission’s decision could serve as the model for the remote work rules to apply to millions of award-reliant employees across the workforce.

The case is significant because it comes as the first signs of weakness appear in the employment market and the push is on to encourage workers back to the office to enliven the central business districts of major cities, which have suffered as a result of an exodus of workers.

Working from home has provided a welcome flexibility for workers but increasingly things have become a one-way street. Federal changes to industrial relations laws have strengthened the hand of employees while giving new rights to refuse to consider work requests out of hours. When an employee is working from home the issues become more vexed, with workers freer to choose their own hours of operation. Greater flexibility is welcome and will suit some employers and their employees. The Productivity Commission has studied the issue and found there were both positive and negative economic effects from the pandemic-driven work-from-home normalisation. Many employers, including NSW Premier Chris Minns, are not convinced about the benefits. Mr Minns has told NSW government workers to get back into the office.

Against this trend, Fair Work Commission president Adam Hatcher says he is keen to develop a working from home term to be inserted into the award covering private sector clerical workers. The ACTU has called for a narrowing of the ground on which an employer can reject a request to work from home and give workers the ability to appeal a rejection to the commission. The commission has previously indicated the “working from home” term should remove existing award impediments to working from home arrangements. The case will also examine how the employer’s obligations relating to overtime operate alongside a “working from home” term, including how the working of overtime hours will be authorised and recorded.

With unemployment starting to rise and big business warning about a new weakness in economic conditions, now must be the time to focus on lifting workplace performance and productivity. Enshrining hard rules on how companies must run their business on issues such as working from home is the wrong way to go.