Westpac’s work-from-home complaint was a cultural miff that doesn’t resonate in today’s Australia | Van Badham

A decision made by the Fair Work Commission in a work-from-home judgment last week has established a potentially transformational precedent for the Australian workplace. Friends, Fair Work has recognised that the Australian workplace of 2025 is not the workplace of 1980s and, oh boy, some corporate types sure are wetting their pants about it. The decision came when an employee from the Westpac group’s mortgage operations team took the bank to the commission for denying her request to work from home to meet care commitments to her primary-school-aged children. Related: Fair Work has ruled a Sydney woman can work for Westpac from home. Can you WFH too? Karlene Chandler lived two hours’ travel away from Westpac’s nearest corporate office. Her working from home hadn’t been a problem before January this year, when Westpac reversed its prior approval for her flexible work conditions, and instead demanded she comply with company policy to work two days a week at an office. Chandler challenged the policy under section 65 of the Fair Work Act. This holds that workplaces must enfranchise workers they’ve employed for more than 12 months with the accommodation of working from home to meet the obligations of various life or carer circumstances. You know – like parenting a school-age child. Chandler had been employed by Westpac for more than 20 years. Fair Work noted her work for the banking group had been completed “very successfully” and she and her team had “performed at a very high level” under working-from-home conditions. Yet somehow doing her job and doing it well wasn’t the issue for Westpac. Fair Work noticed in its judgment the $133bn company could not actually provide “reasonable business grounds” for denying Chandler’s request. What Westpac did provide, in response to Chandler’s challenge, should be listed in a textbook as the purest definition of “cultural miff”. Apparently, Chandler’s “present circumstances had arisen because of life choices and preferences of the applicant and without the imprimatur of Westpac”. Yep, Chandler had moved house – and had children, can you even believe it? – without considering the delicate fee-fees of Westpac management’s corporate culture in these decisions that weren’t about her job nor impeded her capacity to do it. Demonstrated here was the Australian corporate equivalent of a prima nocta level of entitlement, in which the cultural habits of workplace management are so ingrained they override the reality of the work itself. Because while Westpac has been arguing to the commission there was an inherent value in employees attending an office in-person, it is simultaneously running operations across hundreds of locations in Australia, as well as in the United Kingdom, United States, Singapore, mainland China and the Asia-Pacific region, and I don’t think everyone involved is starting their day with a person-to-person meeting and pep rally. I think they’re using the miracle of modern telecommunications to service core business, which is – spoiler alert – why capitalism didn’t collapse when the killer virus Covid-19 trapped the entire corporate world in their homes for a year. So let’s drill into just what is being defended when multibillion-dollar corporations literally argue that allowing Chandler to simultaneously do her job and manage the school run might “undermine the bank’s ability to enforce its work-from-home policy on other employees”. Doing so may clarify for failed Australian prime-ministerial aspirant Peter Dutton why his forced-return-to-work policy for public servants blew up in his face last election and why he was obliged to retract it. Women won the right to equal pay in Australia in 1969, to equal pay for work of equal value in 1972 and the right to work without sex discrimination in 1984. But as we’ve taken our place as supposedly equal partners in the workplace, we haven’t seen commensurate enfranchisement of equality in the home. Women make up more than 70% of primary carers. In 2021, when Chandler moved south of Sydney, 54% of families reported the primary carer of the household’s children was a woman; in only 4% was it a man. Current research identifies Australian women’s “triple-care burden” of simultaneously managing parenting responsibilities, caring for elderly relatives and going through perimenopause themselves – all while holding down jobs. Related: ‘No-brainer’: why Victoria’s work from home laws could benefit the regions “Performing at a very high level” at work in such circumstances should get you a bloody medal, not a trip to Fair Work. Westpac’s complaint about “life choices and preferences” performs an energetically emetic function when you consider how absolutely uninterested corporate Australia has been in making those choices any easier. If Westpac decides it wants private-sector urban housing to become an actual thing in this country, its leadership on such a novel development would be much appreciated. Meanwhile, it is staggering that while women are half of the workforce, a mere 4% of the 7,000+ corporations that report to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency provide any form of on-site childcare for employees, while the overwhelming majority provide no childcare assistance at all. At all. Research demonstrates the majority of work-from-home experiences report job performance gains from improved concentration and engagement with reduced work-life conflict. In fact, one of the strongest risks associated with work-from-home is collapsed boundaries between home and work, leading to overwork. Sure, there are jobs that will always oblige in-person contact, and no one is saying that face-to-face engagement can’t be useful if efficiently managed. But anyone who has ever sat in a team meeting drawing doodles while their brain screams a list of all the other work-related tasks they could otherwise be doing is right to wonder just why any employer is still so invested in maintaining the overheads of enforced office attendance. It’s about maintaining traditional hierarchies in which management can simultaneously abrogate responsibility to the community while maintaining cultural habits of control. I don’t think any modern worker needs to delve very deep into the empirical research to work out the cultural cohort who perceives most benefit from that. Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist