A work from home cartoon.
(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

Opponents of working from home (WFH) are having a hard time of it. NAB staff recently secured an enterprise agreement embedding the right to ask to work from home and limiting the grounds upon which NAB can refuse — despite CEO Ross McEwan spending months railing against working from home. The Community and Public Sector Union has obtained an agreement with the federal government for a similar positive attitude to working from home for public servants. For the segment of the workforce that can work from home, pandemic necessity is morphing into an established right.

There are prominent holdouts. The Commonwealth Bank is fighting a desperate rearguard action against WFH, demanding all of its workers return to the office — ironically while CEO Matt Comyn was isolating due to COVID-19. The Financial Services Union is fighting the order at the Fair Work Commission.

As offices lie vacant, their owners are increasingly worried, especially watching the commercial property sector overseas in tumult due to lower occupancy rates. The arrival of the commercial property crisis here can be tracked by the increasingly worried articles in the Financial Review — commercial property giant Dexus wiping a billion dollars from its assets, super funds downgrading their assets, Dexus rival Charter Hall limiting redemptions in one of its funds.

The commercial property giants hate working from home. Charter Hall’s CEO warned employees working from home that they’d be replaced by robots and predicted they’d surge back to the office after the pandemic because they were sick of being “cooped up” at home. And business lobby groups hate it as well for the impact on CBD businesses that cater to office workers — even though money not spent on lunches and coffees in CBDs will eventually make its way into other sectors, leaving overall demand levels no different whether employees are working from home or not.

But the penny is dropping for a growing number of employers that working from home is here to stay and the best they’ll get is a hybrid model of having employees come in a couple of days a week. According to the Productivity Commission’s latest trade and assistance review, the historic shift towards working from home is not only seemingly locked in, it opens up significant trade opportunities for Australia:

The new frontiers of global economic integration will likely include real-time data sharing between countries, and the growing international tradability of labour. The demonstrated viability of ‘working from home’ during the COVID-19 pandemic may evolve into a ‘work from anywhere’ approach to labour sourcing by companies over time. Associated growth in the international tradability of labour, beyond the trade in accounting or IT services witnessed over the past 20 years, will likely see a broader range of workers participating in foreign labour markets from their own countries, increasing global economic integration in the process.

Nonetheless, the insistence that working from home harms productivity persists as a key employer objection, with the magical benefits of bumping into colleagues in the office kitchen seemingly the source of most innovation and productivity growth of recent decades.

There’s been a proliferation of studies on WFH productivity recently. You can pick whichever one suits your agenda, though studies that are simply polls of whether workers think they’re more productive at home aren’t worth tuppence, and there are very few studies that examine working from home productivity prior to the pandemic, when it was voluntary, and during the pandemic, when a large chunk of the workforce was forced to remain at home, along with their families, regardless of whether they wanted it or had the right environment for it.

The irony of employer objections to working from home is that for decades we’ve been hearing from employers about the need for industrial relations “flexibility”. As we’ve always known, this meant flexibility only in the interests of employers, not workers. That’s been borne out by the reaction to working from home. The Financial Review even editorialised that it was a shame workers were allowed the flexibility of working from home when employers weren’t allowed the flexibility to not pay penalty rates, or not recognise qualifications. It even cited Jeff Kennett, who thinks people working from home should be penalised with pay deductions.

That isn’t just the normal hypocrisy of employer groups. The “productivity” debate is primarily a tool to justify further undermining workers’ pay, conditions and rights. Working from home is one of the few areas where Australia’s industrial relations system has actually delivered for workers over the last decades. In that time, workers have experienced substantial real wage cuts — first as a result of years of wage stagnation and then of profit-driven inflation that smashed purchasing power. Even now as wages growth finally lifts, real wages are continuing to plummet. Yet despite all this, working from home is attacked as a form of employee indulgence.

Given how shabbily workers have been treated for the past decade, they’re perfectly entitled to ignore employer demands to come back to work.

What has the shift to working from home meant for you? Let us know your experience by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.