Bernard Salt says more than 1 million Australians will stick with working from home after Covid-19

Bernard Salt has stopped commuting and says 1m workers won’t ever return to the office. He’s calling for ‘right to disconnect’ regulations for those at home.

More than one million cars are likely to disappear from Australian city motorways forever because the number of people who work from home permanently is set to treble, the nation’s leading demographer Bernard Salt predicts.

However, this “shift in the narrative of urban life in Australia” has a downside, with many employees now feeling as if they are on call 24/7, Mr Salt said. There may be a need to regulate a “right to disconnect”, he added. Unions agree.

In the 25 years before the Covid-19 pandemic, the proportion of the population working from home had held steady at five per cent – one percentage point of which was farmers.

Demographer Bernard Salt at home in Melbourne. Picture: Tim Carrafa

But in the age of coronavirus, industry surveys have shown this has risen to 45 to 50 per cent.

Mr Salt said once life returns to something like normal, the rate will drop back to between 10 and 15 per cent.

Each five percentage point increase above pre-pandemic levels would take as many as 600,000 cars off metropolitan roads, he said, saving the people who used to drive them about 90 minutes a day.

There will also be a benefit to those who do return to commuting, because the motorways won’t be as clogged.

At 15 per cent, 1.8m Australians would be working from home, up from 600,000 now.

When it comes to the way we work, Covid-19 had been a “comet knocking a planet off its orbit”, Mr Salt said.

“This is a shift in the narrative of urban life in Australia,” he said.

The first evidence of the scale of the shift will emerge when the results of the recent Census are published in November 2022.

Mr Salt said he would be looking to see the working from home change in Perth, because the WA capital had been largely unaffected by lockdowns.

“If the ‘Perthlings’ turn up with 10 or 12 or 15 per cent working from home, we will know that by osmosis that lifestyle has seeped across the Nullabor and has become the new benchmark” to which the rest of the nation will eventually revert, he said.

Sydney’s roads have been quiet during the current lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dylan Coker

Mr Salt is one of those who has stopped commuting. Before the pandemic, his routine took him from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs to Docklands and back again.

He said he “kicked and screamed” in protest against working from home, believing he couldn’t do his job properly in his house.

“But now I’ve realised this is better,” he told The Daily Telegraph from his “Zoom room”.

As part of new research for digital workflow company ServiceNow, Mr Salt predicted that Covid would jolt to life the “dormitory suburbs” of major cities which most adults had previously exited each day to go to their jobs.

However, he added, the working from home revolution had a downside, he added.

“Some employees feel they are kind of on call 24/7,” Mr Salt said. “We need to protect against that either by agreement or by regulation.”

Unions NSW Secretary Mark Morey said the term “work from home” is misleading.

“For many it’s more like living at work,” Mr Morey said. “This phenomenon now extends to people on very modest incomes, who are expected to be constantly available.

Unions NSW Secretary Mark Morey. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

“When parents are playing with their kids they should have the right to focus on that, rather than also contending with beeps and flashes from their phone or tablet.

“The right to switch off must be an iron-clad right. Workers need to unplug and relax both for their own wellbeing but also for their longer term productivity,” Mr Morey said.

France has enshrined such a right, as has Victoria Police’s latest enterprise bargaining agreement, struck earlier this year.

Originally published as Bernard Salt says more than 1 million Australians will stick with working from home after Covid-19