Employees regularly grumble about companies ordering them back to the office, at times staging walkouts to protest new return-to-office mandates.
But one union in Australia has gone one step further: Asking a labor court to intervene and stop a company from calling workers back.
On July 12, the Finance Sector Union, which represents professionals in the finance and banking sector in Australia, asked the Fair Work Commission—a tribunal that arbitrates labor disputes in Australia—to help stop an in-person work mandate from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA).
CBA, the country’s largest bank, had asked workers to start spending half their working hours in the office. The union alleged the mandate was imposed without consultation, violated pre-existing contracts, and hurt employees with childcare needs or family duties.
The bank had been beating the drum against work-from-home for a while. The bank’s management “do not believe that there’s any role that can be done completely remotely,” CBA’s HR chief Sian Lewis said at an Australian Financial Review conference. Lewis argued that working-from-home for more than a few days each week reduced collaboration by a third, and expressed worries that extended flexibility might worsen gender imbalances in the workplace.
At the time, CBA told the Australian Financial Review that the bank had given two months’ notice for employees to talk to their managers about remote work arrangements, and that “flexible working options remain available.” (CBA didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.)
The parties are still in negotiation, with both sides taking part in the first Fair Work Commission hearing on the subject today.
Concessions
Other Australian unions have won concessions on working-from-home without needing to turn to a tribunal.
Just a few days after the dispute with CBA, the National Bank of Australia agreed to let all employees request work-from-home after negotiations with the Finance Sector Union. (The bank had earlier demanded senior managers return to the office full-time.) The bank also accepted limits on when it could refuse a remote work request.
Also in July, Australia’s public sector union helped give 174,000 civil servants across Australia’s 103 government departments the right to unlimited work-from-home days.
Australian workers on average work from home about 1.3 days per week, according to a new working paper from a team of researchers including Nicholas Bloom, Stanford professor and founder of WFH Research. Australia’s work-from-home performance is above the global average of 0.9 days per week, but is roughly the same as average rates of working-from-home across the English-speaking world.
U.S. moves
In the U.S., companies are pushing for workers to start coming back to the office for at least part of the week. Since the beginning of the year, companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart, Disney and Meta have all announced plans to bring workers back for at least part of the week. Some firms, like Alphabet and Citigroup, are now saying they’ll consider office attendance as part of an employee’s performance review.
U.S workers have tried to push back against return-to-office mandates. In March, Starbucks employees wrote an open letter claiming that the mandate for in-person work hurt employee morale. Then, in late May, Amazon employees staged a walkout to protest new office work guidelines. Unions are also getting involved, with one group representing Alphabet employees complaining about the company’s decision to evaluate office attendance as a part of performance.
Many employees, however, will likely just quit instead. A June survey from Bloomberg reports that one in two financial professionals would rather change jobs—or just leave—if asked to come back to the office more often.
