Australian unions fight for WFH flexibility as companies shift towards pre-pandemic work setting

As more and more companies start shifting back to the pre-pandemic setting and calling more people back into the office, unions in Australia are willing to fight back and set a precedent by taking the country’s biggest bank to the court and pressurising the government to make ‘Work From Home’ the norm.

“All the deep changes in the Australian labour market have come out of crises. When you have a jolt, you never return to the way the world was,” said John Buchanan, head of the University of Sydney’s Health and Work Research Network.  John talks about how Australia is a much more progressive and adapting country by saying, “We are always ahead of the pack in the English-speaking world, say, compared to the UK, US, New Zealand.”

This can be shown by the act of the staff of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia who took the bank to the industrial tribunal to challenge the order that directed them to work from the office half of the time. In July, even the National Australia Bank had agreed to a union deal that gives all employees, including the 500 managers, the right to request WFH, with limits on grounds of refusal. That same week, the public sector union struck a deal, which lets Australia’s 1,20,000 federal employees request work-from-home an unlimited number of days.

“The genie’s out of the bottle: working from home is something that is staying well beyond Covid and the pandemic,” said Melissa Donnelly, the Community and Public Sector Union secretary who negotiated the Australian federal agreement. “What was possible around working from home has absolutely been transformed,” she added. “This is what this deal achieves. It will have a flow-on effect across different industries.”

The number of WFH days given to employees vary from country to country but the gap between the demands of the employees and the work from office offered by the employers will remain a cause of conflict. In a survey among employees with WFH experience, 19 per cent wanted to return to the office full-time, the survey found. Workers wanted two days a week of WFH, double what bosses wanted, and “the gap is not shrinking,” said Mathias Dolls, deputy director of the ifo Centre for Macroeconomics and Surveys in Hamburg. “I don’t think we will see WFH levels going back to pre-pandemic levels.”

While WFH has been tough for employers, employees can only see the benefits such as a flexible work arrangement which allows the employees to have quality family time and just makes going through life a little bit easier.