If you’re over 55 and too tired to make it into the office, these two Fair Work decisions are required reading | Van Badham

A decision last week about work-from-home accommodations carries implications far beyond the modern workplace and into the realm of a refreshingly material understanding of existential limitation.

It was only in July that Australia’s Fair Work Commission rejected the request from a full-time council employee, Steven Polak, to reduce his days in the office from two a week to one. Polak argued that as he was over 55 and experiencing a work-related fatigue his obliged commute was exacerbating.

Fair Work sided with his employer, accepting the council’s argument that substantial turnover in his team and a dearth of long-serving employees were reasonable business grounds to oblige the continued maximisation of Polak’s in-person presence.

That decision just three months ago stands in notable contrast to last week’s. Here, a 63-year-old Victoria University student adviser, Michele Duffy, sought approval to work from home two days a week, arguing that a reduced commute would alleviate enough physical fatigue to improve her productivity. The university denied the request, arguing that Duffy’s job was to deal with students face-to-face. While the commission accepted that there was business merit to VU’s claim, it ordered that the institution allow Duffy one day a week working from home – without Duffy having to prove a medical condition.

Why not? Herein lies the commission’s transformative realisation. While it had acknowledged that Polak’s commute was depleting, it now accepted that over 55 that depletion was exhausting and therefore Duffy’s request for some relief was … fair enough.

Sure, we could conclude that the change is merely the outcome of different circumstances weighed against a commissioner’s professional discretion. Alternatively, we might muse on the British politician Tony Benn’s claim that “the exhaustion of old age is something people who are younger don’t fully appreciate”, with the observation that the last three months of US news would be enough to shrivel the freshest-faced ingenue into a fossilised prawn.

I prefer to fantasise that someone nominated the French philosopher Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace for the FWC book club and the quote “no poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue does not figure in it” provoked a sudden emotional recommitment to the social project of realism.

There is no better place than an industrial arbitration tribunal for bold stands against inauthentic poetry. Fair Work is precisely where the clash between the human experience of work fatigue and the delusional mythologies of outdated management cultures are brought into sharper view.

Studies published in 2016 and in 2021 found that sleep problems and their daytime consequences “are endemic among Australian adults” while almost half of Australian adults reported at least two sleep-related problems. In 2016, 29% of the adults surveyed attributed errors made at work in the previous three months due to sleep-related tiredness.

Is work to blame? Not solely, although 16% of survey respondents reported working until bedtime, and we’ve had a decade since then of technological advancement allowing more work to colonise our private lives.

Australia’s “right to disconnect” legislation introduced in 2024 is a recognition of how thoroughly the boundaries between work and everything else have been eroded.

Health impacts of the intrusion and the recovery from stress it denies are well understood – from increased cardiovascular stress to cognitive impairment to susceptibility to infection. The World Health Organization doesn’t consider burnout a medical issue but an occupational phenomenon, resulting from workplace stresses that can include long hours, time pressure, shift work, insecure conditions and inadequate support.

Consider this in the context of a revolution in labour force participation and you can grasp the evolution in FWC’s thinking. In 2000 the average age of Australian retirement was about 53 but in 2024 it was 63.8. Age doesn’t just arrive with new physical demands but with demands of life situation. The year Duffy was born, barely a third of Australian women were in the workforce, while the representation of their 60+ cohort was in far lower figures. By 2020, 51.7% of Australian women aged 60 to 64 were working, despite being born into a world that hadn’t imagined they’d exist.

Were gendered expectations surrounding care commitments, family responsibilities and the home similarly revolutionised? Were they, bollocks – the workplace got an overthrow but everything around it has been on a long march.

Managerial culture, meanwhile, is stuck in a hundred-year-old model demanding the visibility and supervision of workers, assessing performance by presence rather than productivity and refusing to imagine commitments outside it. Work-from-home has emerged as an imperfect instrument to address the disconnect; despite management’s resistance to change, studies report workers who are at home provide comparable productivity and less absenteeism.

The most meaningful criticism of the arrangement is that working from home intrudes even further into the hours and realms of a separate existence.

While individuals and unions fight for a responsive, staff-centred workplace, the dogged employer resistance at Fair Work to an overdue paradigm shift has exploded the most ancient myth of industrial relations; that workers have no value.

Clearly, we do. Maybe someone could write a poem about it – if only we weren’t all so bloody tired.