The story of PJ and the EIT

In spring 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping across Europe, PJ was working at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). Her job was officially based in Budapest, where she usually lived, while her family lived in Cologne with her partner and two children. Before the health crisis, she maintained a fragile balance by joining her family in Germany every weekend while working in Hungary. This arrangement, although challenging, was sustainable and in line with her statutory obligations. PJ’s experience in the face of the pandemic crisis illustrates the central issue of this chapter: analysing how the organization of work, historically based on territorial anchoring and physical presence, is being challenged by the widespread adoption of teleworking and the need to balance professional and family life, thus laying the groundwork for examining the structural tensions between territorial labor law and new forms of professional mobility at the European level[1].

The widespread adoption of remote working is changing the game. Although accelerated digitalisation in EU institutions allows for remote working, the EIT’s internal rules are becoming stricter. Teleworking from abroad is becoming the exception, with physical presence remaining the norm, even during the pandemic. However, quarantines, cancelled flights, and restrictions make it virtually impossible for PJ to return to Hungary regularly. She therefore requests temporary authorisation to telework from Cologne until the health measures stabilise.

The EIT twice refused this request, offering brief justifications that were not well supported by the service’s actual needs. The family and psychological difficulties faced by PJ—being away from her children, increased exposure to health risks, and travel fatigue—were not really taken into consideration. With the support of the Union Syndicale, PJ brought the case before the EU Court, which was then faced with the question of whether, in the exceptional context of the health crisis, the Administration could maintain a strict requirement for physical presence even though the material conditions of work had changed profoundly.

The Court notes that the decision of the Director of the EIT lacks justification, that PJ’s situation raises an “unprecedented and delicate” question regarding the interpretation of the residence requirement for staff of European institutions, and that the impact on his family life constitutes serious and irreparable harm. It therefore orders the suspension of the EIT’s decision and authorises teleworking from the place where his family is located.

The case of PJ v. EIT highlights a structural tension that currently exists across all legal systems and organizations: on the one hand, labor law historically structured around the concept of place—whether place of assignment, mandatory residence, tax residence, or place of work—and, on the other hand, a contemporary reality where work tends to be organized in a distributed, flexible, and transnational manner.

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_{[1] Remote workers and their right to disconnect: regulating telework in the EU – EURES. 2022. – Access 02/03/2026}

Enter the worksphere

This case illustrates the change we need to understand. We need to shift our perspective and rely on a different theoretical framework: the worksphere. In their study, Workplace Reloaded. Ensuring Well-Being in the Modern ‘Worksphere’, presented at the 6th annual ETUI conference on ‘The Future of Work’, L. Ratti, A. Kornadt, N. Potocka-Sionek, and C. Vögele introduce the concept of the worksphere. The worksphere refers to the entire environment in which work occurs, encompassing all settings—physical, digital, and cross-border—where professional activities and interactions happen. In the worksphere, technological, organisational, and social transformations have broken the spatial anchorage of work, which was once centred on a single place—the workplace—a place of production, supervision, and sociability. Professional identity is no longer understood as dependent on a fixed workspace, but is integrated into an ecosystem of private, digital and cross-border locations. This model gives way to a dispersed, fluid, and distributed professional sphere, where the boundaries between private and professional space become porous. This theory reveals a structural shift: work is deterritorialized, while legal regulation remains tied to the geographical location of the service.

Thus, the PJ case eloquently reveals both the limitations of a right linked to territoriality and the relevance of mobilising the worksphere as a theoretical framework for rethinking the norms of residence, presence, and work organisation in light of the real dynamics of contemporary work.

According to the analytical framework presented to us by Luca RATTI, associate professor of comparative European labour law at the University of Luxembourg, the worksphere is defined by three characteristics: it is spread out, fluid, and distributed. Here, ‘worksphere’ refers to the environment or context in which work takes place, encompassing its organisation, boundaries, and interactions.

Spread-out: work is no longer localised in a single physical space (the office, factory, administration), but is spread across a multitude of physical or digital locations. The home becomes a workplace. Transportation, third places, and digital platforms can serve as locations for professional activity. The boundaries between personal, family, and professional spaces overlap, sometimes to the point of becoming indistinguishable.

Fluid: the worksphere has no stable form. It evolves according to organisational needs, personal constraints, and health, economic, or technological contexts. This fluidity is reflected in constantly changing workplaces, flexible schedules, multiple modes of presence (synchronous, asynchronous, hybrid), and the ability to quickly switch between personal and professional roles. It also implies a porosity of time: work, rest, family, and mobility are no longer compartmentalised. Work permeates everyday life, making the work sphere a shifting environment, more of a dynamic than a space.

Distributed: the worksphere is no longer centred on a single location or a single organisational entity. It is located wherever professional activity can be carried out. This means that work extends geographically (transnational scales, remote working, dispersed teams), structurally (multiple platforms, digital devices, organisational networks), and functionally (work distributed across multiple environments, tools, and media). From this perspective, the unity of the workplace is disappearing in favour of an ecosystem of interconnected spaces, which in EU institutions and organisations are often cross-border.

The contribution of Ratti and his co-authors thus provides a relevant conceptual framework for analysing how legal regulation, still focused on geographical location, now confronts the reality of digitised and distributed work.

This pressure, at the heart of contemporary work’s evolution, raises questions about the relevance of traditional legal concepts such as the workplace, residence, physical presence, and place of recruitment. These concepts now need to be adapted to an economy in which production occurs within a broader sphere of activity, encompassing professional, personal, and family dimensions.

Operational tools

Conclusion

The PJ v. EIT case is a concrete illustration of a structural transformation: the gradual disappearance of the traditional workplace in favour of a dispersed, fluid, and distributed worksphere. This case highlights the limitations of norms based on territoriality and underscores the need to rethink legal categories such as workplace, residence, and presence in light of delocalized and connected work. The theory developed by L. Ratti and his co-authors provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding the real ecosystem of work and deducing new normative requirements. For trade unions, the task is both to design tools adapted to the risks associated with mobility and to renegotiate collective guarantees. In this way, they become actors in a comprehensive prevention strategy, capable of taking into account the trajectories, temporalities, and vulnerabilities of work that no longer has a fixed anchor. Only then can the flexibility of the worksphere be accompanied by effective guarantees in terms of protection, dignity, and health at work.

Faced with these urgent challenges, it is time to take concrete action. All employee representatives and union representatives should initiate dialogue within their institutions. They should put these issues on the agenda or, on a trial basis, launch one of the tools presented here. Every action, no matter how small, contributes to building collective responses and to ensuring that workplace changes are not made at the expense of workers or without their input.