Businesses in the Australian state of Victoria will be “forced to allow staff to work from home two days a week” under what the state government described as “world-first” laws.
The “sweeping measures”, said The Times, will apply to employers of all sizes and put in place a “legal guarantee” that all Victorian workers who can “reasonably” work from home will be eligible.
However, the state government, which faces elections in November, has received concerns from small businesses that the law will restrict growth, and sparked fears that firms will move inter-state or abroad as a result.
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Remote working no longer ‘under threat’
Working from home suits families because it “saves time and money and it gets more parents working”, said Victoria’s premier, Jacinta Allan. “If you can work from home for a small business, you deserve the same rights as someone working for a big bank.”
The government had previously indicated that small businesses “might be exempt from the laws”, but it was confirmed this week that staff working for this type of company would also be able to “benefit” from the measures, said The Times. The government had “insisted” that existing working-from-home rights “would be under threat” if new legislation were not introduced.
“More than a third” of employees “regularly” work from home, said the state government, and they can save on average A$5,308 “every year” from doing so. It also “cuts congestion” and “gets more people working: workforce participation is now 4.4% higher than before the pandemic”.
The law will come into effect on 1 September and be “enshrined” in the state’s Equal Opportunity Act, said Bloomberg. Businesses with “fewer than 15 workers” will have a delayed start of 1 July 2027 to “allow them to prepare for the change”.
Small business ‘backlash’
“It is hard to keep up with Australia,” said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. It has recently passed “some of the toughest anti-vaping laws on the planet”, a “world-first ban on social media for kids under the age of 16” and banned “artificial stone used for kitchen worktops that is linked with lung disease”.
Even when the work-from-home law was in the planning stage, it was seen as “another groundbreaking move”; it is “shaking the politics of remote working in a way that governments elsewhere may find hard to ignore”.
Several business owners have been “calling for more staff to return to the office”, said the FT. For instance, Nuno Matos, chief executive of ANZ bank, said poor office attendance would be “reflected in lower bonus payments”.
In last year’s national election campaign the Liberal Party promised to “crack down on ‘unsustainable’ remote working patterns” to force staff back to five days a week in the office. That policy produced a “political spark” and Allan’s Labor Party has sought to benefit from it. Its working-from-home initiative will form a large part of her “re-election campaign” in November.
There has been a “backlash” from small business owners over the law, said The Guardian. It could place a significant “regulatory burden” on firms that “don’t necessarily have HR departments to engage with and to consult”, said Scott Veenker, acting chief executive of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “It’s just another added impost”, which could lead to businesses “moving operations interstate or potentially overseas. If you make business too hard, they’ll go elsewhere and that’s the last thing we need in Victoria right now.”
This is already happening, said Sumeyya Ilanbey in the Australian Financial Review. Investors are “fleeing Victoria” because of the plans, believing they will “entrench the state’s reputation as anti-enterprise”.
Politically, the law aims to “wedge the coalition opposition”. They face the choice of “opposing a plan that Labor is convinced is popular with many voters or backing it and losing faith with business supporters”.
