<
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/point-no-return-australians-fight-right-work-home-permanently-2023-08-01/>
'SYDNEY, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global
workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator
Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9
a.m. to hand out assignments.
Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as
early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare
earlier than before the pandemic.
"If they were to say 'everyone back in the office', I would probably be asking
for a raise," said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week.
"You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than
finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home."
As corporate leaders from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to Tesla and Twitter
boss Elon Musk call for an end to pandemic-era remote work arrangements, unions
in Australia are setting a precedent and fighting back, taking to court the
country's biggest bank and wrangling with the federal government to demand WFH,
as it is known, to become 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.
"We're always ahead of the pack in the English-speaking world, say compared to
the UK, US, New Zealand."
Empowered by the lowest unemployment rate in half a century, staff at
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA.AX) took the A$170 billion ($114 billion)
lender to the industrial tribunal to challenge a directive to work from the
office half of the time.'
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: August 3, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-87116817
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
