Work from home rights will fuel tension in the workplace, AHRI warns

“From a cultural point of view, when considering requests for flexible working, the employer considers the effect on the whole business and other employees, not just the effect on the individual employee.”

AHRI’s submission to the commission cited a survey of members last year that found 36 per cent of employees cannot work from home because they physically have to be in the workplace or out on the road.

“Anecdotal feedback from our members is that those employees sometimes feel they’re missing out on a benefit,” Ms McCann-Bartlett said.

“And they feel they’re not being afforded the same opportunities to balance their work and their life as those who can work remotely.”

Currently, workers can make work-from-home requests through existing rights to request flexible work arrangements. However, these are only available to carers, people over 55 years of age, people with a disability or parents with school-aged children.

Ms McCann-Bartlett said a better way to open up discussions on remote working and the full range of flexible work arrangements – including benefits for those who can’t work from home – was by extending existing flexible work rights to all workers.

She pointed to longer shift patterns in retail that provided extra days off for employees or firms that provide extra personal leave for those who cannot work from home.

However, AHRI wants to delay the expansion of the right until 2027, as “many employers have struggled to keep pace with the volume of workplace reforms that have taken place over the past two years”.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has proposed that workers should have the right to request to work from home regardless of service length or reason for requesting it. Each award should have “clear, objective and industry-specific” criteria to determine the reasonableness of the employers’ refusal.

However, employers have countered that some workers are better at home while others work better in the office and strict industry criteria won’t account for that.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said “it is not appropriate to include industry-wide ‘rights’ to work from home in modern awards”.

“Such terms can be negotiated through enterprise bargaining or can (as is evident) arise organically at individual workplaces or in certain industries,” its submission said.

“The creation of a ‘right to work from home’ purely for award-covered workers is entirely impractical and may lead to absurd and arbitrary results (eg. the award-covered administrative staff of an organisation working from home while the award-free managers or others worked from the office).”