Corriere della Sera: Avv. Cominotto on the Legal Challenges of Remote Working
Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading national newspaper, has published an article authored by Cristiano Cominotto, Managing Partner of AL AdvaLux, examining the growing legal complexities arising from the remote working. The piece, featured in the newspaper’s Finance & Economy section, addresses a question that employers and employees across Europe are increasingly forced to confront: when work can happen anywhere, which country’s rules apply?
The article highlights how the absence of a defined workplace creates a cascade of unresolved legal issues. Determining the applicable employment law, identifying the competent jurisdiction in case of disputes, and establishing where taxes and social security contributions are owed all become considerably more complex when employees routinely work from different countries — sometimes without their employer’s full awareness. Avv. Cominotto examines the recent introduction of Law No. 34 of 11 March 2026, which strengthened occupational health and safety obligations for remote workers by requiring employers to provide written risk assessments, backed by criminal penalties for non-compliance. While acknowledging the significance of this reform, the article argues that the new rules primarily address formal compliance without tackling the deeper structural challenges: cross-border tax exposure, the limits of European social security coordination agreements, and the still largely unenforced right to disconnect first introduced by Law No. 81/2017.
A key focus of the article is the disproportionate burden these complexities place on small and medium-sized enterprises. Large multinationals can rely on in-house legal and HR departments to navigate cross-border remote working compliance. Italian SMEs — which make up over ninety per cent of the country’s business fabric — often cannot. The risk, as Avv. Cominotto points out, is that these companies will simply abandon flexible working arrangements altogether, undermining their ability to attract talent at a time when the global labour market increasingly demands it.
AL AdvaLux advises companies, executives and professionals on matters related to Employment Law