Home Office working outside of Germany on German employment contract

[europaeuropa 120]

Hi there, 

 

If you are employed in Germany and your company usually allows home office working 50-100% of the time, and:

 

1) You are a non-EU national with residence rights

 

2) Or an EU national

 

3) And you, briefly for a few days not weeks (i.e temporarily) wish to do your home office days abroad in either:

 a] an EU country, (where you ALSO have work permit /freedom of movement there)

 b] a non-EU country (where you ALSO have work permit /freedom of movement there)

 

On a general level, is this forbidden from a German employment law standpoint?

 

This whole topic has been catalysed since COVID, because during lockdowns people were stranded in whichever country they were in at the time, and many had absolutely no choice but to work home office from abroad, and employers had absolutely no choice but to allow it.

 

Reason I am asking is that I've heard so many conflicting stories from friends working for employers both in Germany and in EU, where employers have cited questionable reasons for not allowing it (German law, taxation etc) in some cases, and in other cases where employers are fine with it if it's just a few days.

 

I also know an EU colleague in Germany who wanted to do a few home office days in her home EU country and she was told she couldn't., with the employer passing the buck saying German law won't allow it.

 

Then other non-EU friends working for German employers who allowed them to work a few days home office not even in an EU country, but US.

 

And in another twist, a further friend (British) who was told they couldn't because they weren't an EU citizen, and they argued that if they work home office in Ireland this should be OK, because of the common travel + work area between UK and IE. In that case, after much harumphing, the employer agreed.

 

Everyone seems to have a different story. And in all cases, their work contracts neither include nor exclude working home office *abroad* although the "concept" of home office working is mentioned in their contracts.

 

It almost seems like employers don't know how to tackle this, and in cases where they reject brief periods of home office abroad, they panic and just say "err... it's 'cos of the law. Our hands are tied"

 

I'd love to know others' thoughts or own personal experiences on this one. 

 

It seems very arbitrary.

 

 

[Dembo 496]

If you're not allowed to work in a country then you're committing a crime in that country and AFAIK not in Germany, though if your German employer tells you it's okay they could be complicit and so understandably no is likely to be the default answer.  And HR generally don't want to lift a finger to help you.

 

If you are allowed and it's "temporary" then you should be okay and obviously people go on business trips all the time. Perhaps the grey area is when a business trip is classified as "work" and when temporary becomes permanent and that's where it becomes complicated for tax and legal reasons. Bei uns we can 100% work at home and of course somebody asked if they could go work permanently from a beach in Thailand or somewhere. To be fair they did go away and research it and came back with the answer of no and it was clarified to say we can 100% work at home as long as that home is in Germany.

 

It's one area that the EU isn't as integrated as you might hope.

[Santitas 587]

Does your health insurance cover you in that country if something were to happen to you while working there? I think that’s the more important question

[pappnase 2,572]

7 hours ago, europaeuropa said:

It almost seems like employers don't know how to tackle this, and in cases where they reject brief periods of home office abroad, they panic and just say "err... it's 'cos of the law. Our hands are tied

This is probably close to the truth. There are clearly examples where working abroad temporarily is legal (otherwise business trips to foreign countries wouldn't happen) however there are probably many ways in which a longer term arrangement could be problematic. I can think of potential issues around tax law, employment law, immigration law, insurance cover and several others.

Rather than spending a lot of time investigating those possible issues when there is no real gain to the employer, an HR department might well fall back on "err... it's 'cos of the law. Our hands are tied". I'm sure in most cases they don't even actually bother to check.

 

I think your example of the British guy who finally got permission after arguing the case is the obvious example here, his management decided that keeping him was worth whatever effort they needed to go through to satisfy themselves it was legal, and so eventually they caved in. I'm sure if it was actually illegal they wouldn't have done it.

[mako1 864]

I think if you are on a German contract, you/the company are required to fill out an S1 European certificate which indicates that your company knows you are working from another EU country and accepts some liabilty. (If it is legal for someone with only a work permit for Germany to work in another Eu land is another question. It is always done for short periods. No one bothers if it is a conference/week/training.)

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/social-security-forms/index_en.htm

No HR wants the bother and the company usually doesn't want to pay (I work for an american company that farmed out this task to some other firm and they (over) charge several hundred euro for each application). Many people simply don't bother and 99.9% of the time it is not an issue. Note that doesn't mean it would be legal or smart, but the chances of something happening are small. But the rules in Germany are that if you working and in home office and you trip over the rug/dog/kid and injure yourself getting coffee (naturally they will say that the rug/dog/kid should not be in your office...), that is a work related injury. This gets complicated enough in Germany and if you visit a doctor in another EU country with a work related injury it might get overly-complicated. 

 

But if you had some injury while working abroad and it was significant it would be a real issue down the road. You get different scenarios if you are injured at work and can no longer work as opposed to if you are on vacation and have some accident where you can no longer work.

Berufsunfähigkeitsversicherung... yet another German specialty.

 

The betriebsrat where I work is trying to get an allowance for employees to work up to 1 day per month in other EU countries but the issues and management pushback make it difficult to see this happening. Issues appear to be the cost of the S1 and the fear that allowing a bunch of non EU foreigners to run loose and work from wherever might not be legal.

 

Corrected: S1 and not A1.