Why are we still talking about WFH?

The working from home debate is possibly the most boring topic imaginable, and yet people seem to love it. 

Bosses and employees constantly say we should just get over the issue, but we’re now in the sixth year of the subject taking up column inches and social media feeds, mainly thanks to those bosses and employees decidedly not getting over it.

It’s a bandwagon so old and evolved that Theseus would have a field day, but it looks like we’re hopping aboard nonetheless. 

Last week, the Fair Work Commission ruled that a Westpac employee could work remotely after the bank had insisted she make the four-hour round trip from Wilton to Parramatta twice a week.

This week, outrage (a couple of posts on X picked up by the usual suspects) erupted following an announcement from Microsoft that Teams would soon record the location of a user, putting the prospect of working from the beach at risk.

These stories could have been written three years ago, pretty much verbatim. So given how rapid the news agenda usually is, why are we all still relitigating the same old arguments?

Well, it could be that WFH is a useful proxy for a slew of other issues. 

Rental prices have risen almost 44 per cent in five years, meaning people are either being forced to live further from offices, or wish to claw back a tiny bit of value by actually spending some time in their overpriced shoeboxes. Childcare is becoming ever more expensive, tempting parents to write reports while bouncing a toddler on their knee. And the task of getting to work is becoming costlier, longer, and more delayed. 

But fixing the housing market, transport infrastructure, and childcare is hard and complicated. So we’ll just continue talking about working from home instead. We can’t wait for the next exciting piece on the politics of the snack cupboard.