If the Dutch Senate agrees, the right to work from home in the country will be enshrined in law
The Dutch parliament has approved a law that grants the right to work from home to employees of many enterprises. As BBC notes, it is possible that this precedent will trigger a revolution in labor legislation across Europe.
The bill on remote work was submitted to parliament by pro-European D-66 party member Steven van Weyenberg and Senna Maatoug from the Green Party. According to it, employees will be able to ask their employer to work from home if the nature of their work allows it, and employers will be obliged to consider this request.
Some global companies have already voluntarily switched employees to a hybrid schedule, allowing them to work from home part of the week. For example, last summer, 73,000 employees of the Swiss bank UBS got this opportunity. This week, its flagship office in London announced that it is subleasing two floors due to a sharp reduction in the need for workspace.
In April this year, France's largest bank BNP Paribas allowed 132,000 of its employees to equally split work between the office and remote work at least until 2024. And when in early June Elon Musk demanded that employees of his automotive company Tesla return to the office full-time or resign, Germany's largest trade union IG Metall said it would support anyone who did not want to comply with the entrepreneur's demands.
German authorities have also announced plans to legislate the right to work from home. In January, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil said the pandemic had pushed employers toward greater flexibility and the government plans to use this to create "modern rules for mobile work in Germany." Minister Heil then assured the public that a new regulatory framework for this would soon appear.
"I have no doubt that legislators around the world will decide to take a close look at the law in the Netherlands and think about the possibility of introducing similar norms in their countries," lawyer Martin Luff of Vinson and Elkins told the British newspaper Telegraph.
Working from home is not the only way to improve the work-life balance for employed citizens that employers and governments of various countries have decided to consider after the pandemic. For example, in the UK, as part of a six-month experiment, 70 companies gave their employees the opportunity to work four days a week while retaining full pay. A similar experiment was previously conducted in Iceland over several years and was deemed successful.