Bosses with only a handful of employees will be forced to comply with the state government’s proposed work from home laws after cabinet ruled out exemptions for small businesses from its re-election pitch to time-pressed workers.
While the government is yet to reveal the design of its contentious laws, a cabinet meeting on Monday agreed to extend a statutory right to work from home two days a week to all employees where feasible, regardless of their workplace or payroll size.
Premier Jacinta Allan announced her plans to legislate work from home rights last August and has promised to introduce the change before the November state election. At the time of the announcement, she left open the possibility of exempting small businesses and people in the early, provisional stage of employment.
However, the government will instead draft legislation to give an estimated 1.3 million Victorians employed by small businesses the same rights as people working for large companies.
The decision was briefed to The Age by a government spokesperson. It is the first in a series of announcements planned this week on working from home, which the government is hoping to make a key part of its re-election campaign.
“If you can work from home for a small business, you deserve the same rights as someone working for a big bank,” the premier said. “Not everyone can work from home, but everyone can benefit.”
Industrial Relations Minister Jaclyn Symes said working from home would boost, rather than drain, productivity.
“Many workers who work from home already turn travel time into work time, saving them money and benefiting their employers,” she said.
The government is expected to confirm this week that it will legislate work from home by inserting into the state’s Equal Opportunity Act a provision making it unlawful to discriminate against people who reasonably insist on working from home two days a week. The provision would not apply to people who, due to the nature of their work, cannot feasibly work from home.
Victoria under the Kennett government ceded to the Commonwealth its lawmaking powers in industrial relations. The government is relying on legal advice that by protecting working from home under equal opportunity law, its proposed regime can sustain a High Court challenge.
The broad view of business is that work from home laws are unnecessary in Victoria, where it has been an entrenched practice since the pandemic.
The Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in its submission to the government about its work from home plans, said three-quarters of businesses already employed staff who regularly worked from home and two-thirds had a work from home policy. It argues remote work arrangements are best negotiated through enterprise agreements rather dictated by government.
Chamber chief executive Sally Curtain said on Monday that a legislative impact statement was needed to reveal the true cost of the proposed laws.
“Make no mistake, it will be significant,” Curtain said.
“The state government has not responded to our significant and enduring concerns raised on behalf of business when this was first announced. These include the cost to the private and public sector, offshoring of jobs, loss of investment, required funding of the regulators and impending pay rise requests from front-line workers such as police, nurses and teachers.”
Tim Piper, the Victorian chief of the Australian Industry Group, said legislating work from home was unnecessary for businesses of any size.
“The state government has already told us that the number of workers this will impact is really small,” he said. “I don’t see the point of any exemptions – I don’t see the point of forcing anybody to be doing this, to be honest.”
The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia has previously warned that many of its members would not be able to accommodate remote work arrangements.
No Australian state or territory has a legislated a right to work from home. The Allan government proposed the idea after internal party polling conducted during and after last year’s federal election revealed the depth of voter disquiet at then federal opposition leader Peter Dutton’s pledge to bring public servants back to the office full-time.
The Victorian opposition has so far reserved its position on the issue.
The state government last year received nearly 40,000 responses to a publicly funded survey about working from home. According to the published results, six out of 10 professionals work from home and 74 per cent of employees describe remote work arrangements as extremely important to them.
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Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
