The FNV union opens a hotline for so-called cross-border workers who cannot or are not allowed to work from home due to their employer. Frontier workers are people who live in the Netherlands, but work in Belgium or Germany, for example. The union says it has received several reports of employees being treated unequally “on the basis of their country of residence”.
During the corona crisis, many people have been forced to work from home. Frontier workers who started working from home during this period were protected if they worked in a country other than where they lived. Different rules may apply to such employees, such as social insurance, taxes and pensions.
These tax measures no longer apply since 1 July, FNV writes. As a result, the border workers now have to keep track of every hour that they work from home. In addition, the cross-border workers are “often restricted to work from home”, the union signals. Sometimes companies have stipulated this in a home working protocol, sometimes this appears in practice, according to the union.