The Fair Work Commission is holding its first hearing today as part of a review into work-from-home rights for clerical workers. It's looking at whether the right to work from home should be extended - from those who need to, to those who want to, and it's being seen as an important test case for more than 1.8 million people in clerical and administrative jobs in Australia.
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00:00So the current state of play is that employees who have completed 12 months continuous service
00:07and who fit into a number of protected categories, including, for instance, being a parent, are
00:14able to request flexible working arrangements, including working from home.
00:19And that request then needs to be considered by their employer.
00:22And the employer is able to refuse the request on reasonable business grounds.
00:27And those sorts of reasonable business grounds can include, for example, if it's not workable
00:32from an operational perspective, if it would have a material impact on customer service,
00:39or if there are any other health and safety considerations and the like.
00:43And so that's the same with workers across industries and occupations.
00:48That's the current state of play in terms of working from home and flexible work more broadly.
00:53I don't see that it will be enshrining in awards a guaranteed right to work from home.
00:58The Fair Work Commission has recognised that there are some impediments currently within
01:02the modern awards and specifically the clerical award that make it more difficult in terms
01:07of the requirements around spread of hours, breaks and the like.
01:13And so where I see this going is that there'll be a clause that will enable there to be some
01:18flexibility with those specific award terms to enable the employee to request.
01:23But I imagine there'll still be a balancing and a requirement of the consideration of
01:27the broader circumstances as to whether that request is granted.
01:31And it won't ever be a one size fits all approach.