Employers are seeking work-from-home-related changes to the clerks award to make it easier to spread out working hours without requiring penalty rates, remove minimum engagement restrictions and overhaul meal and rest break provisions.
The FWC has pointed to a Victoria Police branch's brush with the "red line threshold" for public sector service delivery as reinforcing the business case for rejecting a prosecutor's request to work from home on Mondays.
A FWC full bench led by President Adam Hatcher has abruptly ended conciliation of the crucial clerks award WFH case after a "highly regrettable" leak of confidential information to the media, while issuing a broader warning that participants should respect processes conducted behind-closed-doors.
A Metcash coordinator working from home since she started her job during the coronavirus pandemic has won rare flexibility orders requiring the distribution giant to exempt her from a directive to return to the office, so she can minimise risks for her child with cystic fibrosis.
The FWC has made it clear that a "mere preference" for working at home without providing sufficient evidence of responsibilities or needs will not pass the first hurdle for a flexible work order.
In what stands as the FWC's first substantive scrutiny of gig economy contracts under new laws, an Uber driver is seeking $50,000 compensation and multiple changes after claiming that app malfunctions unfairly shift the burden of lost revenue and that opaque processes for investigating misconduct allegations create a "power imbalance".
The "labour productivity bubble" that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic can provide lessons for the future, and hybrid working can be more beneficial to productivity than wholly working from home or the workplace, according to a new Productivity Commission report.
Just 6% of clerical workers who seek WFH arrangements are knocked back by their employer, according to a new Swinburne University study commissioned by the FWC as part of the work from home test case.
A retrenched educator who rejected an alternative role because she wanted to keep working from home at least a day a week has lost her severance entitlements, after the FWC found she did not have a formal right to maintain her flexible arrangements.
A psychologist who fled Darwin for regional NSW in "disturbing" circumstances has failed to persuade the FWC that her employer lacked reasonable business grounds to deny her request to continue servicing clients on Zoom.
