Maersk office staff in Antwerp strike over the company ending home working worldwide

Around 100 office staff at A.P. Møller-Maersk’s Antwerp offices went on strike on the morning of Thursday 1 October 2026, in an action organised by the white-collar union BBTK. The dispute is over the company’s plan to end existing home-working arrangements from 1 January 2027, a change Maersk is applying across all its offices worldwide rather than only in Belgium.

Belgian staff currently work from home up to three days a week. The union representative said employees were willing to compromise but that “five days is too much”, citing Antwerp’s traffic congestion. Further industrial action is reported for Tuesday 13 October, though that date rests on secondary reporting and is worth confirming.

Why this matters

This is one of the few European return-to-office disputes that has reached actual industrial action rather than a petition or an open letter, and the reason is structural: Belgian white-collar unions have standing to negotiate working conditions at company level in a way that most of their equivalents elsewhere do not. Where that structure exists, a global policy set at headquarters runs into a local bargaining obligation.

If you work for a multinational that is standardising its remote policy globally, the Belgian, Dutch, German and Nordic entities are where the policy is most likely to be modified, and where any concession is most likely to be documented. That is worth knowing before you accept that a worldwide policy is fixed.

Context

Maersk employs several thousand people in Belgium across Antwerp and Bruges. The strike came in a week that also produced the Mercedes-Benz four-day works agreement in Germany and the Barclays delay in the UK, with Belgium separately preparing a mandatory daily working-time recording duty from 1 January 2027.

What to watch

Whether the 13 October action goes ahead, and whether Maersk’s Belgian entity negotiates a local variation on the worldwide policy before January.