Working from home, office days and the works council's right of consent

A computer and electronics company in Amsterdam had required its staff to come into the office two days a week since March 2022, and at the end of 2023 wanted to make it three. The works council invoked the nullity of that decision and, in September 2024, also rejected the formal request for consent. In June 2025 the subdistrict court found for the works council (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2025:3782): a working-from-home arrangement affects working conditions and therefore falls under Article 27(1)(d) of the Dutch Works Councils Act (Wet op de ondernemingsraden). The employer was refused substitute consent, because the interests of the staff carried more weight. AWVN, the Dutch employers’ association, noted that one ruling does not change the prevailing line: consent applies to parts of an arrangement, and to the arrangement as a whole only if its purpose falls under Article 27.

Three months later, on 15 September 2025, the subdistrict court in Oost-Brabant ruled in summary proceedings on Caterpillar Work Tools, which had withdrawn its working-from-home policy without asking the works council. Here too the works council was entitled to declare the decision void; according to the court, scrapping working from home touches on workload and work-life balance. Until the works council consents or the court grants substitute consent, the decision stays on hold. Employment lawyer Ruud Olde draws the same conclusion from both cases: in each, the instruction came from a foreign head office, and in each, the court found that the working-from-home arrangements had long since become ordinary terms of employment rather than a temporary Covid measure.

On 6 October 2026 Booking.com appeared before the same subdistrict court in Amsterdam. The company wants the roughly 7,000 employees at its head office in the office at least two days a week, one day with the team and one of their own choosing, and argues that this has been the recommendation since 2022. The works council sees no convincing business case and refuses consent. At the hearing the judge hinted that two days seemed very little and that forty per cent of working time in the office would be reasonable, in the interest of employee wellbeing. The parties were given a week to reach an agreement.

The surrounding figures barely move. According to the Netherlands Working Conditions Survey (NEA) 2025 by TNO and Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 45 per cent of employees sometimes worked from home, ten hours a week on average, and that share has been almost constant for three years. In financial services and IT it is nine in ten employees. Strikingly, of all the employment conditions measured, working from home scores lowest on importance (63 per cent consider it important) and also lowest on satisfaction (78 per cent). It is the employment condition people care about least and fight over hardest.

In January 2026 Lynda Gratton, professor at London Business School, predicted that hybrid working will settle down through team-level agreements that make expectations explicit and predictable. Organisations that keep insisting on a rigid office mandate will, in her view, continue to face friction. It is an expectation without a measurement of its own. It does fit what Dutch case law is now showing: office attendance is decided at the table, with the works council present.

How solid is this? Three court cases in fifteen months, from June 2025 to October 2026, and a growing stream of commentary from employment law practice, from AWVN in August 2025 to HR Praktijk in October 2026. The appeal in the Asus case and the ruling on Booking.com are still awaited, and the working-from-home figures themselves are flat, so the picture is not yet settled.