Working from home should be a right, not a reward

The Australian state of Victoria was due to enforce a legal right to work from home starting September 2026. But just weeks away from its implementation, the new premier, Ben Carroll, has announced a year’s delay in response to fierce business opposition.

Thousands of miles away, in Portugal, parents of young children already have a legal right to work from home without needing their employers’ approval.

All of these developments raise the question: should workers be given a legal right to work from home?

There is an argument that firms should have full discretion over their employees’ working arrangements, including whether they can work remotely.

However, by giving bosses complete control over such decisions, we are in danger of affirming the importance of profitability over wellbeing and ignoring the needs of working parents.

Workers’ wellbeing

One justification for taking remote work policy out of bosses’ hands is to boost workers’ wellbeing. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to work remotely. Maybe you want to avoid a long, sweaty and costly commute. Maybe you like to go on a jog during your lunchbreak. Maybe you need to pick up your child from school. When bosses have full control over their remote work policy, your preferences can be treated as irrelevant to that decision.

Sceptics might push back that if bosses were to bend to workers’ will, this would harm productivity. The pursuit of profit is arguably the best way to guarantee productivity growth. This expands the economic pie, from which we all benefit; a rising tide lifts all boats.

The question of whether remote work is bad for productivity is hotly contested. But let’s suppose that it is. Even so, productivity isn’t the only thing that we care about, surely. Presumably, we also care about people’s wellbeing. And since many people’s wellbeing would be improved by having the option to work remotely, it seems odd to give this consideration no weight.

This is especially so, given that bosses can decide where their employees work based on fairly arbitrary reasons. For example, a recent study found that “narcissistic leaders” often demand their workers return to the office simply to boost their ego.

A cynic might nevertheless protest that workers can always leave: if your firm doesn’t let you work remotely, you can join another one that does.

But how easy is it to leave, really? Moving jobs often requires changing location, retraining, and so on – and landing a new job is no easy feat. In the meantime, a right to work from home would protect workers from being subject to their bosses’ whims.

A further reason to enshrine a right to work from home is to promote gender equality. When women have children, they often move to lower-paid part-time work or drop out of the labour force altogether. This is a major driver of the gender pay gap and can leave women dangerously dependent on their partners for financial support.

Working from home reduces the gender pay gap by enabling mothers in remote-compatible jobs to keep their careers alongside doing the school run. While this primarily helps women with office jobs, it’s still better than nothing.

That said, social scientists have warned that having the option to work from home can harm women by creating a new glass ceiling: mothers self-select into remote work, and remote workers get promoted less. On this basis, the economist Nicholas Bloom has argued that employers should not give their employees any say over which days they work from home.

But this argument rests on a mistake. It is true that the option to work from home may result in a two track trajectory where women are disproportionately set back in their careers. But the likely alternative, where there is no option to work from home, is even worse for these same women.

Another concern is that if women choose to work from home, they could end up doing more housework and childcare. But the solution is not to deny people the option to work remotely, but instead to change outdated gender norms.

Innovative policies are also available: in Portugal, under the work from home policy, parents of young children in remote-compatible jobs must take it in turns to work remotely, so it isn’t always the mother who stays home.

Bosses are clawing workers back with return-to-office mandates. Many don’t care about promoting workers’ wellbeing and gender equality – unless, of course, it impacts their bottom line.

But society should care. And these ideals are better served by at least partially taking the choice out of employers’ hands.

We stand at a fork in the road. Should we continue to let firms roll back the option to work from home, or should governments step in? One thing’s for sure: the case for letting bosses decide isn’t as straightforward as it may initially seem.