Netherlands poised to make work-from-home a legal right, says report

More pressing are RE prices and fuel prices. Companies refuse to accommodate by giving higher pay and are too stubborn to adopt fulltime remote. In theory, this is one way to push them out of their comfort zone without hitting their bottomline that could tackle at least 4 separate problems.

There is no "civil unrest". farmers are indeed protesting and they are supported by some rightwing parties and media. Media makes it much bigger than it actually is in terms of unrest. Yes, farmers have it rough, and it's largely due to the unwillingness of the Dutch government to tackle the problem of having too much livestock on a small piece of land combined with banks who kept on pushing farmers to borrow more money to buy bigger stables. (Guess what: the farmers are not spraying manure onto the front doors of the banks.. Well played guys!) This has been going on since the 1980's and every iteration of the Dutch government since then has been unwilling to make some tough decisions.

The role of the banks (actually the Rabobank who supplies credit to 90% of all farmers) have been very dubious. There are farmers who want to change into a less environmental unfriendly way of business but banks won't finance them due to the fact it's not "optimizing" the business in terms of output per square feet of stable (read: livestock). As we say here, the banks have also butter on their head, but they are being kept out of the main discussion. This seems to change with some media reporting on their role, but it's still highly dubious.

To summarize, it's a Gordian knot were farmers, government and banks have each other strangled in a weird menage-a-trois. Rightwing media and parties jump into this for their own gains.

We have a lot of those, they cant just make something up. If the reason for refusing is dubious it stacks with similar requirements. Dutch law also instructs to be a well behaved employee and a well behaved employer without any written specification.

Not everyone can work from home.

Doctors, service workers, construction workers, pilots.. an endless list of jobs literally can not be done from home.

The right is more about that it is an option where available, because obviously it wouldn't make sense any other way.

In the US, there are limits to all of our constitutional rights. Laws that limit these rights must pass constitutional muster. Different rights have different tests the laws must pass. Generally speaking, in a challenge of constitutionality, the state has to show its interest meets a certain threshold, an "adequate reason" you could say. (FYI This is a limited and simplified element of constitutionality.)

I don't know much about the legal system of the Netherlands, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don't think it is fair to come to the conclusion that this doesn't create a right because of the limit on it. However, if the law allows employers to define "adequate reasons" themselves, then I agree the whole thing is illusory, but I do not know that to be the case here.

Fun fact: Roe v. Wade, when it was the precedent, explicitly mentioned the government's interests in protecting women's health and protecting prenatal life as a reason for limitation (the "adequate reason"). The law in the case was a carte blanc ban on abortion, which almost by definition, didn't balance any legitimate interests and was thus found unconstitutional.

Gotta make sure the workers do their work! And also, very important to have useless chit-chat around the coffee machine the whole time, and useless meetings with managers who have too much time on their hands.

It's pretty oke I'd say. You can get many tax benefits and loads of people are willing to work for promising startups.