The Commission says EU workplace health and safety law does not cover working from home

EU employment ministers met in Luxembourg on 19 October to debate the forthcoming Quality Jobs Act, and the clearest statement of the problem came from the European Commission itself: the existing Workplace Directive “applies only to work on the employer’s premises and does not cover working from home or other forms of remote work.”

The Act is expected to carry several strands in a single text, including common standards on the right to disconnect, limits on the use of AI in recruitment and performance monitoring, and new standards for working in extreme heat. Portugal’s labour minister pressed for human oversight wherever AI decides on recruitment or assessment, and Spain’s Yolanda Díaz pushed for minimum standards on extreme weather. The Commission presents its draft in December 2026.

Why this matters. If you work remotely in the EU, the directive that governs workplace health and safety does not reach the place where you actually work. That is not a loophole somebody is exploiting; it is the acknowledged scope of a directive written for premises. It means your display screen equipment, your seating, your lighting and your working hours at home sit outside the framework that would cover them in an office, and whether anything fills that gap depends on your own country’s rules.

Watch the December draft for how far it goes. Unions want legislation across every area under consultation, while employer bodies want enforcement and simplification of what already exists, though they concede that updating the health and safety directives may be justified. The gap between those two positions is where the scope of any new remote-work obligations will be settled, and the text that emerges in December will shape what employers owe home-based staff for years.