transferring file relative to work dir

[Ryan Brothers]

I am trying to transfer a file specified by an absolute path and have
it be relative to the work dir.  When I run the following example from
the man page:

echo /tmp/./foo/bar.txt | parallel \
  --sshlogin server.example.com --transferfile {} wc

I'm getting an error:

1 1 4 /tmp/./foo/bar.txt
rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/foo" failed: Permission denied (13)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous
errors) (code 23) at main.c(1039) [sender=3.0.6]

I was expecting to have foo/bar.txt put into the work dir.  Should the
above example give this error or is there another way to accomplish
this?

Thanks for your help.

Ryan