© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The central business district (CBD) of Melbourne can be seen from the area located along the Yarra River called Southbank located in Melbourne, Australia, July 27, 2016. REUTERS/David Gray/File Photo
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By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9 a.m. to hand out assignments.
Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.
“If they were to say ‘everyone back in the office’, I would probably be asking for a raise,” said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week. “You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home.”
As corporate leaders from JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:) CEO Jamie Dimon to Tesla (NASDAQ:) and Twitter boss Elon Musk 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.
“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 (OTC:) 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.
In April, the CEO of Australia’s third-largest bank, National Australia Bank (OTC:), ordered 500 senior managers back to the office full-time. In July, NAB agreed to a union deal that gives all employees, including the 500 managers, the right to request WFH, with limits on grounds of refusal.
That same week, the public sector union struck a deal the which lets Australia’s 120,000 federal employees request work-from-home an unlimited number of days.
By comparison, Canada’s federal workers ended a two-week strike in May with a wages agreement that came without…
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