Should Working From Home Be a Legal Right?

The Australian state of Victoria was due to enforce a legal right to work from home starting in September 2026. Weeks from implementation, the new premier 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 employer's approval.

Both raise the same question: should this be a right rather than a privilege granted at an employer's discretion?

The case for leaving it to firms

The standard argument is that companies should have full discretion over working arrangements, including whether staff can work remotely. They carry the commercial risk, they understand their operations, and they are best placed to judge what the work requires.

The difficulty is what that discretion implies. Giving employers complete control affirms the priority of profitability over wellbeing, and treats the needs of working parents as an externality.

Many women find that working from home is what allows them to keep a career at all. Photograph: PeopleImages

The wellbeing argument

There are plenty of reasons to want to work remotely. Avoiding a long, hot and expensive commute. Running at lunchtime. Collecting a child from school. When employers hold complete control over remote policy, those preferences are simply not inputs to the decision.

Sceptics respond that bending to workers' preferences harms productivity, and that the pursuit of profit is the surest route to productivity growth, which expands the economic pie for everyone.

Whether remote work actually damages productivity is hotly contested. But suppose it does. Productivity is still not the only thing anyone claims to care about. If many people's wellbeing improves with the option to work remotely, it is strange to assign that consideration no weight at all.

The arbitrariness problem

The argument sharpens once you look at how these decisions get made in practice.

Employers can determine where staff work for reasons that have nothing to do with output. One recent study found that narcissistic leaders often demand a return to the office simply to reinforce their own status. A policy set by ego is not a policy defensible on productivity grounds, and there is no mechanism inside a firm for distinguishing the two.

"You can always leave"

The cynic's reply is that workers who dislike a policy can join a company with a better one.

How easy is that, really? Changing jobs often means relocating, retraining, accepting a pay cut or an interruption in seniority — and landing a new job is difficult in any labour market. Exit is a real constraint on employers only when it is cheap for workers, and for most people it is not.

A legal right functions as protection in the interval: it stops the terms of your working life from turning on your manager's temperament while you look for something else.

What the two experiments will show

What makes Victoria and Portugal worth watching is that they are running the natural experiment the productivity debate has lacked.

Portugal restricted its right to a defined group with an obvious claim — parents of young children — which limits the disruption and concentrates the benefit. Victoria attempted something broader and hit organised business resistance hard enough to lose a year.

That contrast is probably the most useful finding so far. The political economy of a universal right differs sharply from a targeted one, regardless of what the productivity evidence eventually says.