Australians Fight for the Right To Work From Home Permanently (reuters.com) 75
As corporate leaders 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. From a report: "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 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.
fight ? like how ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or are they going to "fight" by telling the government to reign down more free stuff on them ?
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You call that a sword?
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Ok boomer
You sound like one of my millennial employees. He thinks working an 8-hour day is "too much" and that it's perfectly acceptable to play video games in between the intermittent support calls he takes. He regularly misses 3-4 days of work per month. The last reason he gave was that his "dad doesn't like driving in city traffic, so he needs to take the day off to drive his dog to the vet for a check-up". No, nothing wrong with the dog. It's just time for his annual check-up.
For this, he keeps whining th
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Why is he still your employee then? That's more your fault than his.
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I can't understand why anyone would get a pet and have the balls to have a full time job and then even further, care for the animal properly. What a fucking idiot.
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So this has happened for months and wasn't properly corrected by the person in charge. Sounds like a poor leader. I would never let my employees ignore the rules for 3 months, let alone 6 months.
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At this point what does "millenial" even mean though outside of a perjorative for "younger than me and i dont like that!" ? Technically people in their early 40's are on one end of millenials and people in their mid 20's are still considered millenials but godamn theres a pacific ocean between those two age groups and their experience.
Also I have never had a job, ever, that let me just "miss" 3-4 days a month, unless they are taking PTO in which case shut your mouth that's what PTO is for.
Also you hired an
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Note this sentence: Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.
Hence a Millennial COULD be 27 years old, so, not menopausal and definitely not, 'their time came and went'.
The problem with evaluation by outcome (Score:2)
Are they missing deadlines? If the answer is "no" then whats the problem?
So how do you set deadlines? Generally, employers are paying for reasonable effort over time. If they have no ability to see into that, then the obvious answer is that they should increase demands until the person buckles under the load, then back them off slightly. Or fire them if they don't get to the desired productivity.
I just think people should put in good effort during the period for which they are paid. For most companies, that'll put you squarely in the "dependable" category.
If you're paid to do it
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Sure but what is the line between "minimum necessary" and "reasonable effort over time". It's managements job to set the expectations and deliverables to the employees and indeed good management is setting goals that your team can achieve.
This underlying concept of the "spoken" expected reasonable effort and this hidden, "unspoken" effort that people are judged against to me is a sign of bad management and part of the distinct power imbalance employers enjoy in their favor.
Now again, advancement is another
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"The minimum" is not dependable, unless you mean in the sense you can count on them to be barely adequate. "Dependable" is up to the evaluator. To me, dependability isn't routine execution - it's knowing that under unknown circumstances I can count on their contribution.
I absolutely judge people on qualitative criteria. So should every manager. How interested are they in what they're doing? Do they have any personal investment in maintaining their quality of work? How willing are they to improve their skill
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You're reversing cause and effect. BECAUSE they were getting no raises, no advancement, and were first in line when the hammer falls, they started giving minimum effort.
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By that point, you were generalizing one bad employee to an entire generation, so I commented on the more typical conditions that generation has found.
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your fantasy company where one employee earns $7k/mo and doesn't do shit and you work your ass off and get paid $3k/mo? Totally fair, right?
Sure, I can win any scenario I make up about you in my head too.
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Frankly, the last time I didn't go to work my explanation was "I don't wanna".
It's amazing how much you can get away with when you're actually qualified. Try it some time, you might like it.
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Frankly, the last time I didn't go to work my explanation was "I don't wanna".
It's amazing how much you can get away with when you're actually qualified. Try it some time, you might like it.
Sure. If your qualified. But if you keep it up, eventually someone (maybe even slightly less qualified but willing to consistently show up...maybe even for less pay) will take your place.
I work my ass off every day because I negotiated good pay in exchange for my skills and actually doing the job. I like being able to provide for my family. I enjoy being able to spend my money on things my kids enjoy and will teach them. Maybe tomorrow it will bite me in the ass and the company will randomly fire me
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I'm right with you there. I'm well paid, and I do good work. If I got punted tomorrow, I would have had a great beneficial arrangement.
All working relationships are pay-as-you-go. Nobody owes us employment for life. When you and an employer collaborate on growing your career, it's a great symbiotic state. But each side should be reaping the benefits along the way.
The stories about layoffs always revolve around the hurt and the negativity, because that's human nature. Nobody ever says, "My employer laid me o
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That's the second part of the plan: Be cheap.
I have 20 years in security, a background in financial auditing and law. A combo that is ridiculously rare and as you might imagine in pretty high demand in any business dealing with securing financial operations. As you can imagine, I could demand pretty much what I'd want, but my monetary compensation is around half of what I could get.
The other half is job perks. I come when I want, go when I want and if my boss doesn't perform to my liking, I have him fired.
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> and that it's perfectly acceptable to play video games in between the intermittent support calls he takes.
Bloody amateurs. I play video games while in remote meetings. When did millennials stop being able to multitask?
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Who is “they” in this context?
I don't know about that (Score:1)
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And? 25/2 is more than enough for most teleworking. Heck we've had no problem teleconferencing with family members who even had a fraction of that speed.
How Do You Manufacture A Car (Score:2)
From home? Now get your lazy ass back to the plant.
Re:How Do You Manufacture A Car (Score:4, Insightful)
The "Fairness" factor (Score:1)
Those that work in a plant or factory are already back to work in said away from home place. The people wanting to work from home are the coders, IT workers and paper pushers who sit at a desk all day staring at a screen. I'm with them, though. No need to waste time commuting and polluting up the planet if you can do your job just as effectively from home.
While that makes sense on paper, it does nothing to address the resentment factor... the notion that its unfair for some in a company to work in the comfort of their home while others HAVE to come into the office. It doesn't address the sometimes massive resentment from other employees who AREN'T coders or administrative types. The morale issues here are not minor ones.
A senior leader in my org got WFH shot down in my division because he went to the top and complained "If MY guys have to get up and come to
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Those that work in a plant or factory are already back to work in said away from home place. The people wanting to work from home are the coders, IT workers and paper pushers who sit at a desk all day staring at a screen. I'm with them, though. No need to waste time commuting and polluting up the planet if you can do your job just as effectively from home.
While that makes sense on paper, it does nothing to address the resentment factor... the notion that its unfair for some in a company to work in the comfort of their home while others HAVE to come into the office. It doesn't address the sometimes massive resentment from other employees who AREN'T coders or administrative types.
This has been going on, probably, since the dawn of people working in multi-worker environments. The people resenting their fellow workers who are able to work from home are the same people who resent them for working in the cushy office jobs to begin with. They either need to get over it or educate themselves so they too can work in one of those cushy jobs.
Laugh if you wish, but it's also likely that IT and Admin types are the ones most likely to have their jobs AI'd out of existence in the future, so maybe WFH shouldn't be the hill to die on.
I don't know what your point here is, the workers on the assembly line or pick and pack departments are just as much at risk of losing their jobs to a
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Those that work in a plant or factory are already back to work in said away from home place. The people wanting to work from home are the coders, IT workers and paper pushers who sit at a desk all day staring at a screen. I'm with them, though. No need to waste time commuting and polluting up the planet if you can do your job just as effectively from home.
In addition, once companies discover that remote workers are as efficient as in office ones, they can begin to even more aggressively pursue workers in lower wage areas with the required skill level. It need not be off-shoring as much as lower cost of living areas in country.
Such genius (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not going into an office because Bob in accounting is lonely or because Steve is operating heavy machinery.
Nope (Score:1)
I forget which billionaire but one of them said that all it'll take to get everybody back into the office is a nice little recession. Then you won't have enough bargaining power to say no. He's working on that recession with his pals over at the Federal reserve if you're an American. I'm sure if you're not Ame
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Also because many CEOs just can't accept that people work better at home. They see the evidence but they just don't feel convinced. Deep down inside they believe people only work when they are watched, and remote workers will be lazy and steal time from them. They might not say it so directly, but this belief is a significant motivator of the push to come back.
There is a flip side of this to consider, not that anyone will. If we do establish working from home as the new norm for jobs that befit it, we w
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From home? Now get your lazy ass back to the plant.
The auto industry in Australia died nearly a decade ago because we made cars that were too expensive to sell in America and too expensive and American to sell in Europe.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn (Score:3)
When was this ever a right? (Score:1)
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I didn't see anything in TFA saying this should be a right (although TBH I only skimmed it). It sounds like this is all about negotiating contracts.
I did see several references to record low unemployment, which ought to give workers a strong negotiating position. If that's the contract hill they are willing to die on, knock yer socks off. As other threads have pointed out, this only is relevant to the laptop class: factory workers and baristas still need to show up somewhere.
With that in mind, I wonder what
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Answer. Never. Not now, not ever.
Right are granted and fought for. There's a reason why Australians have a *right* to 4 week holidays, while Americans STFU and get back to work. They fought for those rights and had them codified.
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These people already have the right to work from home permanently though. What they don't have the right to do is dictate to you or me where they will work from if we employ them. As their employer we get to decide that and if they don't like the arrangement they can work for themselves or someone else who will allow them to work from home.
Why not describe it honestly? Oh, right.
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What they don't have the right to do is dictate to you or me where they will work from if we employ them.
I hereby cordially welcome you to the entire point of this action. You're right, they don't have this right. Yet. Just like they didn't have a right to a 4 week holiday before they fought and campaigned for it.
Life changes, civilisation adapts, ... well except in America where workers rights are summed up with the word "LOL".
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Answer. Never. Not now, not ever.
Right are granted and fought for. There's a reason why Australians have a *right* to 4 week holidays, while Americans STFU and get back to work. They fought for those rights and had them codified.
Very true, however employers look at the total cost of a worker and 4 weeks vacation, benefits are all part of the total cost and thus salaries adjust accordingly. No one gets free paid vacation time; it's all factored into the compensation.
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Working from home permanently has always been a right.
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Yep....if you are in business for yourself!!!
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Correct, or if your employer allows it.
I'm confused (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they not already have the right to work from home permanently? Does the Australian gov't force them to leave their house to work?
Or does this really mean they want the gov't to ban employers from requiring they come back to the office?
Right. Pretty big difference. Word games aren't helping anything.
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The only one playing word games is you. Literally everyone else knows what this is about.
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Nope, we all know how rights work and that rights aren't exclusively infringeable by governments. Incidentally this kind of sentence is precisely what is used to identify a human vs an AI since it requires contextual understanding of what the subject of the sentence is doing. So congrats, you're no better at understanding English than an AI.
Don't be obtuse (Score:1)
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If you have the right to vote, that does not just mean the government can't stop you from voting. It means they must set up polling places, hire poll workers, verify the validity of voting machines, and subject the entire process to audits in order to make sure that your vote is counted accurately.
If you have the right to an attorney, that does not just mean the government can't stop you from hiring an attorney. It means they have to maintain a staff of bar certified professional attorneys and make sure o
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The government has no right to dictate to business that they allow employees to work wherever they please.
You as an individual have the right to choose where you work. If you provide enough value to your employer you might even be able to dictate that you work from home. If they say no you have the right to choose another employer who will. That is called negotiation, the thing unions are *supposed* to do instead of lobbying the government to coerce the employer by threat of force.
Your teachers have failed
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I was incorrect applying "right" to something the government has (is in "government has no right..."). I was using that word in the colloquial sense when a better choice in the context of this discussion would've been "the government has no place..." to avoid this confusion. Governments don't even have rights, they have powers granted to them by the consent of the governed (us). It's a huge difference.
You could not be more wrong with your definition of "rights" though, and frankly it's a pretty sad reflect
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I see. You aren't trying to understand the article. You just don't like what the Australians are doing.
Usually when I hear people talk about "inalienable rights" and "consent of the governed" it's in reference to the American Declaration of Independence. But that can't be what you're referencing can it? I mean, in a conversation about what rights Australians have...?
It's a dark future (Score:1)
It's not a right, you're forcing companies to change their business model and work structure to accommodate you.
It's going to be ugly, you're actually going to make it horrible, and upper level people who can work from home will hate you because of what will come next.
Performance is going to get fine tuned, since they can't see you're working and assume you're reasonably being productive, they're going to come up with new systems to check peoples productivity, new KPIs and metrics to measure how much work y
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You must work in a seriously shit job if that's your attitude. If my employer wanted any of that from me, I'd simply walk away and get another job at a decent company. If you're good at what you do and your skills are in demand, you don't have to take shit.
Don't try to gaslight me, you're out of gas like the rest of people who do that shit.
I'm in a great job, I can actually work remotely, and I don't need to convince the government to force my company to let me, because I'm good at what I do, and my work is in demand.
If you were good at what you do, and your skills were in demand, you wouldn't need to try and get the government to force these companies to let you work remotely. It's all the people who aren't in that category trying to make this happen. I'll b
Needs to be balance (Score:2)
Speaking as someone who works in IT in Australia we have a hybrid model of WFH and in the office.
If the mob I work for was to mandate full time back in the office I can guarantee a raft of resignations within 3 months as people move to organisations that do support a more hybrid model.
Finding good people is hard here at the moment and they will vote with their feet.