Massive work from home victory revealed

A new Survey by Australian start-up Espresso Displays has shown that working from home is ‘now the norm’, says Tech Guide Editor Stephen Fenech. ‘Their study among more than a thousand corporate workers show that this is now the norm,’ Mr Fenech told Sky News Australia. ’60 per cent of businesses offer that sort of flexibility for their employees to work from home.’

For the first time, most Australian workers will have the right to dispute a refusal of a flexible work request.

While that might sound like a legal technicality, it’s actually a very significant change to the law that was passed late last year but only came into effect today.

We all know that Covid showed workers could work flexibly in ways that were never conceived before.

Working flexibly isn’t just about working from home as is the commonly portrayed notion.

It means being able to alter your hours, alter your days and even work part-time after the birth of a child.

Of course, we saw during the Covid outbreak dramatic change in the way people worked for large swathes of our workforce.

Essential service workers, of course, were less likely to be able to make changes – it’s hard to drive a train from home.

Nonetheless, changes were dramatic. The pendulum, however, has swung backwards, and swung hard. Employers, including government, want people back at work.

Elon Musk says that working from home is “morally wrong” when service workers have to turn up to work.

But in reality, it’s going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

Workers don’t want to give up being able to work flexibly, including working from home. They’ve enjoyed the fact that they can spend more time with their families, avoid long commutes and the simple little things like taking your dog for a walk on a Friday morning.

Prior to today, if you were one of the types of employees who were actually able to request a flexible work arrangement under the Fair Work Act – that is, because of carer responsibilities, having a disability, being 55 or older, or experiencing violence in the family – even though you could make a request, the only right you had was for written reasons as to why a request might be refused.

From today, while the type of worker who can make a request remains the same, they have the right to challenge a refusal of a request for flexible work arrangements.

The law could have gone further and brought in the right to make a request to every employee, not just those with particular attributes.

Nonetheless, the change is still significant.

It’s yet to be seen how disputes will be resolved, and decisions in tribunals under similar laws haven’t always been promising.

Tribunals have been reluctant to intervene and overturn employers’ decisions when they’ve said no.

What that reflects is that there remains a commitment to supporting managerial prerogative among courts and tribunals.

Furthermore, we’re all still grappling with hybrid work and getting the productivity outcomes that employers want and need.

In my profession, the law, the almighty billable hour has often been the sole way to measure productivity, which doesn’t always create healthy habits or appropriate outcomes for clients.

Another option is increased tech surveillance of workers to measure their actions and productivity, but that sinister path is one we should be wary of, especially at a time where tech privacy is already a significant concern.

And finally, in the midst of all of this, many workers and unions are fighting for the right to disconnect as working from home can lead to abnormally long hours and people working even though they’re sick or trying to care for others.

We’ll have to see how this new jurisdiction unfolds, but there is no question that giving employees the right to dispute a refusal of their request to work flexibly is a positive step, and an important one recognising the new ways in which we work.

Giri Sivaraman is a principal workplace lawyer with Maurice Blackburn Lawyers