Employers across the country have been told to “plan for the worst” and prepare for the possibility of Covid-style working from home arrangements.
There is growing talk of whether Australia could soon see a rise in “Covid-style” measures to combat the fuel crisis, as an increasing number of countries introduce new mandates around working from home and shortened work weeks.
The world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, has issued 10 recommendations in response to the global oil shock, which included “work from home where possible” at the top of the list.
In Pakistan, the government has ordered 50 per cent of its public sector employees to work remotely, along with implementing a four-day work week.
Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka are all either calling for people to work from home or have implemented a four-day work week.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has not yet confirmed whether an official working from home push is on the cards for Australia, but he has called a national cabinet meeting for Monday to consider new emergency measures to conserve fuel.
It is understood the measures being examined include carpooling, working from home when sensible and public transport discounts.
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While we will need to wait until Monday to hear whether these types of measures will be on the cards, a leading Australian employment and industrial law barrister has warned that employers should start preparing for the possibility of WFH mandates now.
Asked whether there is a situation in which companies could be forced to allow employees to work remotely – if the job allows – as a result of the current crisis, Ian Neil SC said, “it is a real possibility”.
“If fuel becomes scarce, as many pundits suggest it will, to the point of affecting economic activity, the ability for people to travel, productive activity by employers and so on, then yes we will see that happening,” he told news.com.au.
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Not only that, the barrister predicted that both employers and employees will want to rely on working from home, for different reasons, “but all headed in the same direction”.
Mr Neil said the Covid-19 pandemic is a useful model for what might happen if the current situation continues to worsen.
He pointed out there are many people predicting that “this will become an economic crisis of a scale that we haven’t seen since the pandemic”.
He noted there were special arrangements made to allow the continuation of work during the pandemic through legislation changes, which were “necessary because of the whole structure of our system of regulating employment did not accommodate flexibility of that kind”.
The changes made were “quite prescriptive in the forms of work they allow”, Mr Neil said, with that kind of flexibility not being available prior to the pandemic.
Under the Fair Work Act, certain employees who have worked with the same employer for 12 months can request flexible working arrangements and employers are obligated to genuinely try to reach an agreement with them.
They can only refuse a request to work from home if they can prove there are reasonable business grounds to do so.
Mr Neil said the provisions made during the pandemic would all “have a role to play now” if an employee requested flexible working arrangements as the result of the fuel crisis.
“If employees came to their employer and said ‘I can’t travel to work, I can’t buy the petrol, I can’t pay the price that is now demanded or public transport is no longer working as it did’ – all of those would be proper basis in which employees could ask or request a flexible working arrangement,” he said.
“And by making those requests they would be engaging statutory provisions that did not exist at the time of the pandemic and which now exists largely as a consequence of our experience of the pandemic.”
Even though it is not yet known whether the Australian government will get to the point of mandating working from home arrangements, Mr Neil said employers should already be preparing for this scenario if they don’t want to be caught off guard.
“The employers who will cope best with this are the ones who begin thinking about it now, making plans and talking to their employees,” he said.
“The employers who are caught on the hop are the ones that wait and hope nothing will come of it.
“This, it seems to me, is not an issue that can be avoided.”
Mr Neil said there is a possibility that the crisis won’t continue to worsen and Australia will be able to cope if we do experience wider fuel shortages.
“But there is no employer, from the largest to the smallest in Australia who can do anything to prevent what is going to happen. Because what is going to happen will be dictated by events over which we in this country have absolutely no control,” he said.
“That means it is prudent to plan for the worst, and to plan for the worst in this situation means thinking about how to handle it and talking to your employees.”
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