Quarter Of Employees Work Some Time At Home

May 26 2006 - 24% (2.2 million) of employees worked some of their main job hours at home in November 2005, according to a report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

This is a significant increase compared with the 20% of all people employed found in a similar study in June 2000.

Over one-third (35%) of those who worked at home in their main or second job gave 'catching up on work', followed by 23% who gave reasons such as 'wanting an office at home/no overheads/no rent'. The largest group of people who worked at home were professionals (31% of men and 38% of women) followed by managers and administrators (24%) for men and advanced clerical, sales and service workers (15%) for women.

8% of employed people (724,500) spent more time working in their own home than at any other single location in their main or second job. Of these:

• Almost four-fifths (79%) were aged 35 years or older
• 55% were women
• 40% had children under 15 years of age
• 40% gave 'wanting an office at home/no overheads/no rent' as their main reason (most of this group were business owners)
• 72% worked less than 35 hours at home

Business owners were most likely to work mainly at home - 27% of the 1.9 million business owners, compared with 1.5% of the 7.5 million employees. 46% of the 585,000 women business owners worked mainly at home.

Information was also collected about other working locations of the 9.4 million people at work in November 2005:

• 80% worked at their employer's or client's workplace in their main job
• 36% spent some time travelling for work, and
• 42% worked in two or more locations during the reference week.

Almost nine in ten (89%) employees worked mainly at business premises in their main job in comparison to nearly a half (49%) of business owners.

Further details can be found in Locations of Work, Australia, November 2005 (cat. no. 6275.0).

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