Overview
The week’s clearest signal came from the European Parliament, where the Employment and Social Affairs Committee voted 41 to 12 for a new directive on psychosocial risks at work. If it became law, changing telework arrangements or introducing automated monitoring would require a prior psychosocial risk assessment carried out with workers’ representatives — turning decisions currently announced as management prerogative into something an employer has to assess and justify first. The plenary vote is set for October.
Spain produced the week’s most concrete developments in both directions. Airbus Spain’s 35-day strike ended with the 40% telework agreement fully intact and extended to new hires, while at Ubisoft Barcelona Mobile an indefinite strike over a five-day office mandate continues without agreement. The difference is instrumental rather than emotional: Airbus staff were defending a term of a collective agreement, Ubisoft staff are trying to establish one. Separately, the Balearic high court upheld the dismissal of a lawyer with 26 years’ service over nine unauthorised days worked from home — a reminder that tolerated remote working and agreed remote working are different things in law.
Two employers used geography rather than policy to end remote work. Volvo Cars will close its Stockholm office in March 2027 and told 450 software and AI staff plainly that staying remote is not an option, and Uber cut 3,300 corporate roles while reducing fully remote staff to about 1% and withdrawing previously granted exemptions.
EU-Level Policy & Regulation
MEPs call for a psychosocial risks directive. The EMPL committee’s legislative-initiative report, adopted 31 August by 41 votes to 12 with 4 abstentions, asks the Commission to propose minimum EU requirements on work-related psychosocial risks. Teleworking arrangements, automated decision-making and monitoring systems are named explicitly as changes that should trigger a prior risk assessment. It restates the right to disconnect and requires human oversight of algorithmic systems. Plenary vote in the October I session; the Commission then has three months to respond. (European Parliament)
Border flexibility measures expired on 6 September. The discretion allowing member states to pause biometric collection under the Entry/Exit System at congested crossings has ended, and the Commission declined to extend it. Enforcement is expected to be uneven between member states for some months, so first-crossing waits become less predictable for anyone travelling on a third-country passport. (The Guardian)
Country Updates
Spain
A Royal Decree on transparent working conditions is due this week. The Council of Ministers is expected to approve a decree transposing the EU directive on transparent and predictable working conditions — four years overdue, after a Commission referral to the CJEU. It would oblige employers to set out salary breakdown, working-time distribution and probation criteria in the contract, and give every worker an individual right to know the criteria of any algorithm used to allocate their work, set their hours, or decide on promotion or dismissal. (EFE)
Airbus keeps 40% telework. The preliminary agreement ending a 35-day strike preserves the existing telework agreement in full and extends it to new hires, with individual two-day arrangements respected. (La Razón)
A dismissal upheld over nine telework days. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de les Illes Balears upheld the disciplinary dismissal of an in-house lawyer employed since 1998, who worked from home on nine days in August 2024 without the prior written approval her employer’s rules required. The court found manifest disregard for internal rules and declined to apply gradualism. (Capital)
Monitoring limits set out. Employers may geolocate teleworkers at clock-in and clock-out but not continuously through the day, and any measure must be simultaneously suitable, necessary and proportionate. Around 3.3 million people in Spain now work remotely at least some of the time. (Infobae España)
Extremadura pays for telework. €1.8 million in grants offering €2,500 per employee moved to telework and €2,500 per flexible-hours measure, each capped at €10,000, so up to €22,000 per business. Autónomos who employ people are eligible. Applications close 15 November, opening once the convocatoria appears in the Diario Oficial de Extremadura. (Junta de Extremadura)
United Kingdom
Tribunal time limits double on 1 October. Claim time limits move from three months to six under the Employment Rights Act 2025, applying where the act complained of falls on or after that date. Scotland’s breach-of-contract claims follow on 9 November. The same Act makes refusal of a flexible working request subject to a reasonableness test, with consultation on the revised Acas Code expected this autumn and the substantive changes taking effect in 2027. (Lewis Silkin)
Pay in job adverts is on the table. A two-phase consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination includes a requirement to publish pay information in job adverts and the reinstatement of statutory pay questionnaires. It closes 27 October 2026. (Slaughter and May)
Ireland
PayPal notified the Department of Enterprise of a collective redundancy affecting 164 people, nearly 12% of its 1,380-strong Irish workforce, spanning remote and on-site staff, with departures proposed between 7 and 21 October. (RTÉ)
Netherlands
Pay transparency targeted for 1 January 2027. Bill 36949 would require employers to state pay or a pay range in job adverts before negotiation and bar them from asking about current or previous salary. Employers with 150+ staff report on 2027 pay data by June 2028. (Salaris van Morgen)
Seven countries, one courtroom. Worker Info Exchange International filed a collective action in the Amsterdam District Court under the Dutch WAMCA regime on behalf of Uber drivers in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Romania, challenging dynamic pricing and algorithmic management. (Institute of Employment Rights)
Greece
Greece is preparing to transpose the EU platform work directive, affecting around 50,000 people. The central change reverses the burden of proof: platforms must show a worker is genuinely autonomous rather than the worker proving dependency. No bill text or date has been published. (Parapolitika)
Sweden
Volvo Cars will close its Stockholm office on 1 March 2027, moving the work to Gothenburg and affecting around 450 staff at its software, AI and digital customer experience hub. Asked whether they could take Gothenburg roles and stay in Stockholm remotely, the company said no. (Göteborgs-Posten)
Corporate Watch
Uber cut around 3,300 corporate roles, roughly 10% of its global corporate workforce, and will reduce fully remote staff to about 1%. Remaining remote employees are being asked to relocate to hub offices, and previously granted exemptions from the three-days-a-week hybrid policy are being withdrawn. Withdrawing exemptions rather than changing policy is becoming the common route, and it is quicker and quieter than announcing a new rule. (The Guardian)
AI Search & GEO Developments
Google’s generative AI performance reports completed their global rollout on 31 August. Site owners can now see impressions by page, country, device and date across AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features — though with no click data and no query data. A property-level control to remove a site from those surfaces rolled out alongside it, all-or-nothing until page-level control arrives in March 2027 under the UK Competition and Markets Authority order. (Search Engine Land)
An evidence review found two widely promoted tactics return null results. Serving markdown to AI crawlers and adding JSON-LD schema were the two GEO interventions tested with rigorous designs, and both failed to produce significant lift; publishing an llms.txt file showed no measurable effect across large-sample studies. What did correlate strongly: brand and video mentions, classic search rank, and page freshness, with 75% of cited pages updated within the past year. (Something Inc.)
Research & Data
Hybrid workers made more progress on home days. A study of 219 hybrid workers at a single employer, published in Organization Science, found greater goal progress and faster working on home days than office days. The proposed mechanism is energy stability — about 33% less energy variability at home, with each percentage point of reduction associated with 26% higher goal progress. (Phys.org)
Norwegian researchers pushed back on five-day mandates, citing a study of 24,763 public-sector office workers in which those with flexible work-from-home arrangements had a lower risk of reporting mental health problems than those who never worked from home. (ScienceNorway)
Events
Cross Border Coworking Conference, Zadar, 12–15 October. The sixth edition runs at the Rector’s Palace, organised by the City of Zadar with INTERA Mostar, Tehnopolis Nikšić, BIT Centar Tuzla and the University of Zadar under the Interreg CODES project. Attendance is free with mandatory registration, and places close on 20 September or when the room fills. Remote Work Europe’s Maya Middlemiss joins the “Where is remote work taking us next?” panel with Mita Carriman and Jan de Jong, moderated by Tamara Kojić. (Zadar Events)
What to watch next week
- Tuesday 8 September — Spain’s Council of Ministers is expected to approve the Royal Decree on transparent and predictable working conditions, with publication in the BOE expected shortly after.
- 15 September — SMART ERA’s second open call for rural community micro-pilots closes at 13:00 CEST. (smartera-project.eu)
- 20 September — registration closes for the Cross Border Coworking Conference in Zadar, 12–15 October. (zadar.events)
- 1 October — UK employment tribunal time limits double to six months.
- October I plenary session — the European Parliament votes on the psychosocial risks report.
- 27 October — the UK equal pay and pay transparency consultation closes.
Last week’s digest: Week 36