Why corporate Australia still thinks you should live in an economy rather than a society
For a moment, Australia looked like it was on a new path of worker power. Covid gave workers flexibility, pay rises, negotiating strength and the prospect of work-life balance. For once, they had some power. Then people like Chris Ellison got cranky. Have we blown a big chance for reform? John McCarthy reports
On a trade mission to Asia in the 1990s I was part of a delegation that visited a factory that seemed to produce everything from televisions to tennis balls for the export market. It was massive, there was acres of floor space churning out product.
Portraits of its owner were everywhere and there was a cult of personality evident. Workers ate and slept on site for about $2 a day plus lunch.
The owner needed them there to work long hours, so he made sure they ate, slept and worked under his roof. They were less likely to be distracted by family issues or wander off to work somewhere else or take a day off.
It didn’t seem like a terrific long-term strategy. Worker loyalty is a fickle thing.
Mineral Resources boss and Perth billionaire Chris Ellison was not on that trip but his worker relations theory is not too different. Ellison has talked about how he wanted workers to stay put, not wander down the street for coffee or go to the gym so he brought it all in-house, even childcare.
“I want to hold them captive all day long,” Ellison said. “I don’t want them leaving the building … I don’t want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that cost.’’
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“I have a no-work-from-home policy. I wish everyone else would get on board with that – the sooner the better. The industry can’t afford it.”
It’s a bums-on-seats policy and is killing one of the biggest reforms in work practices in decades.
A recent survey from KPMG found that 80 per cent of chief executives believe work from home will be dead in three years.
While plenty of business leaders would agree, this type of thinking tends to dehumanise and reduce people to economic units. It removes trust and it means we are living in an economy, not a society. Executives should be asking why WFH was so popular in the first place.
Ellison isn’t alone. Tabcorp also announced it was “resetting’’ the company to bring workers back. It’s a euphemism that comes from the same part of the dictionary as “rightsizing’’.
Plenty of other companies have brought workers back to the office including the big tech corporates like Amazon, which was a major beneficiary of the pandemic era.
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During Covid, about a third of people worked from home. Time and cost savings were the big pluses as well as flexibility. There was also a massive leap in the adoption of some digital technology, which also had productivity benefits.
Economist John Quiggin found the reduction in commuting of one hour a day during Covid was the equivalent of a 13 per cent lift in productivity, far greater than the lift from privatisation, deregulation and the national competition policy of the 1990s.
There were also stories of people moving to regional areas because they no longer had to be in the city. Noosa was a prime option for the tech bros, but plenty of towns that had once battled to keep their young workers also saw an influx.
An ACTU survey found 82 per cent of people still wanted the option to work all of part of their week from home.
Work from home isn’t all good. There was social isolation, plus work-home boundaries were blurred and there was a loss of collaboration. Plus, they worked longer hours and there was a severe impact on property values in the city. Restaurants, cafes and retail outlets all suffered as workers stayed at home.
But for many, the flexibility (or the blurring of boundaries) was a good thing. A UQ study found that if people believed they had a good work-life balance they were more productive. And the new right to disconnect laws recently implemented are about helping workers switch off.
Work from home was one of the great unplanned successes that came out of Covid. For many companies the only planning was who would hand out the laptops as workers scrambled out the door.
No one had the chance to sit down and figure out a planned approach and now Australia seems to be throwing away the prospect of improving life because managers feel more secure with “bums on seats’’.
But just like the way Australians shrugged and accepted all the restrictions and changes during Covid, they have shrugged again at the weakening of WFH.
