Swiss Senators' Committee Backs 17-Hour Working Window for Home Office — But Strips Out Two Worker Protections
Published on 10/13/2026 at 22:31 | Editorial boerse-global.de
A key Swiss parliamentary committee has thrown its weight behind a revised bill governing mobile work, voting 7 to 2 with 3 abstentions to advance legislation that would reshape how working hours and rest periods are handled when employees work away from the office, according to a report dated 13 October 2026.
The decision by the Ständerat's economic affairs committee (Wirtschaftskommission) keeps the bill alive, but not before the panel removed two provisions that the Nationalrat, Switzerland's larger parliamentary chamber, had previously inserted.
What the committee cut
Gone is a clause that would have given home office workers an explicit legal right to be unreachable — a "right to non-availability" that would have shielded them from employer contact outside working hours. The committee declined to enshrine that protection in law, meaning the question stays where it has been: with individual employment contracts or company-level agreements.
Also struck from the draft was a Nationalrat-approved loosening of Sunday work rules. Under that proposal, employees would have been permitted to work up to nine Sundays per year, for no more than five hours each time, without needing a permit. The committee rejected the relaxation outright.
What survives
Despite those deletions, the bill still aims to bring Swiss labour law in line with the realities of location-independent work.
Its headline element is a widening of the daily working-time window to as much as 17 hours. The idea is to let employees spread their working day across a longer stretch, making it easier to juggle professional duties alongside private commitments.
That expanded window comes paired with more flexible rest-period rules. In presenting the draft, the committee stressed that these accommodations should be implemented without weakening statutory health protections for workers. Squaring that circle — giving companies flexibility while preventing health-damaging overload — is the balancing act the legislation is meant to achieve.
Next stop: the winter session
With the committee's sign-off secured, the file now moves to the full Ständerat, which will take up the amended draft during the upcoming winter session.
Because the committee's positions on Sunday work and the right to non-availability diverge so sharply from the Nationalrat's earlier decisions, a formal reconciliation process between the two chambers is now on the horizon. Parliament will have to settle how far labour rules should be relaxed for home office arrangements — and which protections for employees should remain binding.
