Seconded to Amstelveen From Abroad: Which Country's Employment Law Protects You

Why this comes up in Amstelveen

Amstelveen holds the largest concentration of foreign corporate postings in the Netherlands relative to its size - long-established Japanese corporate presence, the international schools that grew up around it, and the Schiphol business corridor. The characteristic employment relationship here is not a local hire but a secondment: employed by a parent company abroad, working in the Netherlands for a term, on a contract that was never drafted with Dutch law in mind. That is precisely the arrangement where the governing-law clause and the applicable protections diverge.

What Article 8 of Rome I actually does

Article 8 lets the parties choose the governing law. The critical sentence is what follows: that choice may not deprive the employee of the protection afforded by provisions which cannot be derogated from by agreement under the law that would have applied in the absence of choice.

So the analysis runs in two steps. First, which law would have applied without the clause. Second, what mandatory protections that law contains. Those protections apply on top of the chosen law - you get the benefit of both, not a choice between them.

The temporary-posting rule cuts the other way

Where there is no choice of law, the contract is governed by the law of the country where - or failing that, from which - the employee habitually carries out the work. Article 8 then says something that surprises people: the country where the work is habitually carried out is not deemed to have changed where the employee is temporarily employed in another country.

For a genuine short posting, that points back to your home country rather than to the Netherlands. It is why 'I have been working in Amstelveen for two years, so Dutch law applies' is not automatically right - and why how the posting was documented, and whether a return was contemplated, does real work in the analysis.

There is also an escape clause. If the circumstances as a whole show the contract is more closely connected with another country, that country's law applies instead. Where you actually work, are paid, are taxed and are managed from all feed into that.

Posted workers keep a core of Dutch terms regardless

Separately from Rome I, the Dutch implementation of the EU posted workers rules guarantees a hard core of Dutch employment terms to workers posted here, whatever law governs the contract. That core covers minimum wage, working and rest time, health and safety, equal treatment and minimum paid leave.

This is a floor, not a full transplant of Dutch employment law - it does not by itself hand you Dutch dismissal protection. But it means a posted worker is never entirely outside the Dutch system, and it is the first thing to check when a home-country contract provides less than Dutch minimums on pay or leave.

Where this bites: the end of the posting

The dispute rarely arises while things are going well. It arises when the posting is ended early, when the role in the home country has quietly disappeared, or when a restructuring at the parent removes the position you were expected to return to.

At that point the question of which law governs stops being academic, because the answers differ enormously - notice periods, severance entitlement, whether a ground for dismissal is needed at all. Establish which law governs before responding to a termination, not after, because in some scenarios the response itself affects the outcome.

What to gather

The original contract and every addendum, the assignment or secondment letter, evidence of where you have physically worked and for how long, which entity has paid you and from which country, where you are taxed and socially insured, and any document describing what was to happen at the end of the assignment.

That last one matters more than people expect. A posting documented as temporary with a defined return is treated differently from one where the return was never specified and the home-country role was filled behind you.

What this page is based on

• Rome I Regulation (EC) No 593/2008, Article 8 - individual employment contracts
• Wet arbeidsvoorwaarden gedetacheerde werknemers in de EU (WagwEU) - posted workers

Checked against wetten.overheid.nl and rechtspraak.nl in August 2026. Dutch employment law changes, and several reforms described here have passed parliament without yet being in force - where that is the case the page says so.

Common questions

Other employment situations

• DelftDismissed during a probation periodProbation clauses are void, not shortened, when they exceed the limit. Check the contract length first.
• LeidenRetaliation after raising a concernReporting suspected wrongdoing is protected. Retaliation for it - including quiet non-renewal - is not lawful.
• GroningenRedundancy for economic reasonsYour employer needs permission before it can make you redundant, and the selection rule is prescribed by law.