Issue 129
Welcome to the latest edition of our international employment news update.
In this edition we look at:
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France's glass ceiling shifts – boardrooms diversify, but the top jobs remain out of reach
France has made strides on gender diversity in the boardroom, but a new report exposes a stubborn blind spot: getting women into governance bodies is no longer the hard part – keeping them out of the top jobs apparently is.
The 2026 IFA and Ethics & Boards Barometer, which tracks gender representation across CAC 40 and SBF 120 companies, shows female representation on executive and management committees has climbed to around 30%, up two percent in a year. On boards of directors, women hold approximately 46% of seats – a figure that has held steady for five years and places France at the front of the European pack.
But women chair just 5% of CAC 40 boards and 13.3% of SBF 120 boards. They account for 10% of CEOs. 30% of women in leadership bodies run operational activities or profit centres – the roles that traditionally serve as the launchpad to the top job – compared with nearly 60% of men.
After more than fifteen years of regulation pushing women into governance, France now faces a subtler and arguably harder challenge: ensuring the pipeline actually leads somewhere.
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Europe braces for Middle East migration surge
Europe is gearing up for a potential wave of migration from the Middle East as the region's conflicts deepen. More than one million refugees from Syria and Afghanistan crossed into EU countries via Turkey in 2015-16.
Amy Pope, director-general of the International Organization for Migration, told the Financial Times that a prolonged conflict would drive people to move. "We will start to see people moving," she warned. European governments, acutely aware of anti-immigrant sentiment across the continent, are pressing for early, coordinated action rather than a reactive scramble.
Cyprus, the EU's closest member state to Lebanon and the only one struck by Iranian drones, is already in active discussions about managing new arrivals. One model under consideration is the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, under which Ankara received financial support in exchange for hosting Syrian refugees. For now, displacement remains largely internal: the IOM reports that 83,000 people have been displaced within Lebanon in recent days, with a further 60,000 still uprooted since Israeli strikes on Hezbollah leadership last summer.
Pope also flagged the plight of foreign workers in Gulf states, describing them as "often forgotten" and frequently left without adequate support or information during crises.
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Spain's Supreme Court draws the line on parental leave: full weeks only, holidays in full
Spain's Supreme Court has brought much-needed clarity to one of the more contentious corners of Spanish employment law. In its judgment of 26 January 2026, the Court ruled on two disputed aspects of the eight-week parental leave introduced under Article 48 bis of the Workers' Statute.
The first question, how the leave can be taken, has now been firmly settled. Where an employee opts to take parental leave in separate periods rather than all at once, those periods must be taken in complete weekly blocks. A request to take leave from Monday to Wednesday, or Monday to Thursday, will not be valid; the minimum unit is a full week.
The second question – whether parental leave counts towards annual holiday entitlement – has been answered in the affirmative. The entire period of parental leave accrues holiday in full, with no proportional reduction permitted. The Court's reasoning aligns with EU Directive 2019/1158 on work-life balance, which requires that rights acquired before or during parental leave are preserved.
For employers, the practical consequences are immediate. Leave policies, HR guidance, and payroll and time-management systems should all be reviewed to reflect the new rules. Requests for discontinuous leave must be processed in whole-week blocks, and the corresponding periods must be treated as generating annual leave in full
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New Dutch cabinet changes direction on legislation for self-employed professionals
The Employment minister Thierry Aartsen is scrapping the current complex set of rules aimed at defining who qualifies as a self-employed professional, based on whether or not they own their own tools, pick their hours and have specific expertise.
The revised legislation will allow self-employed professionals who do not earn enough to live in a reasonable manner or to save up for a pension, or for periods of unemployment and illness, to go to court to demand they are treated as regular employees. Thierry Aartsen said: "if you earn less than EUR38 an hour, you will be able to say that you should be an employee."
The aim is that the amended bill will be approved by both houses of parliament before the summer and will take effect early 2027.
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Slovakia cracks down on illegal employment
Slovak labour authorities have significantly stepped up enforcement against undeclared work, deploying inspectors across the country in a series of sweeping operations that signal a tougher era for non-compliant employers.
In 2025, the National Labour Inspectorate carried out almost 17,000 inspections nationwide, uncovering 693 illegal employers. Nearly 32,000 individuals were checked in total, with 1,211 found to be illegally employed.
The scale of the problem is growing: the number of entities employing workers illegally rose by 162% compared to 2024, while the number of fictitious self-employed persons – individuals formally registered as running a business but in practice performing dependent work without employment protections – increased by 192%.
In a five-day operation in February 2026, almost 100 inspectors targeted temporary employment agencies across Slovakia, visiting 333 workplaces and identifying suspected violations in 42 entities involving 74 individuals, of whom 47 were classed as bogus self-employed.
The Labour Minister has confirmed that such nationwide operations will now be conducted regularly – and without warning. Legislative changes are also in the pipeline. On the sanctions side, as of 1 January 2026, the minimum fine for illegal employment has doubled from EUR2,000 to EUR4,000, rising to EUR8,000 where two or more workers are involved, with a maximum penalty of EUR200,000 remaining in place.
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The Dutch cabinet’s plan to cut parental leave benefits could reverse gains in gender equality
The Dutch government’s plan to reduce parental leave benefits for middle- and high-income earners could lead to more gender inequality. According to NOS, researchers say the measure would disproportionately affect men, who typically earn more than women, and may discourage fathers from taking leave.
Ten years ago, fathers were entitled to just two days of paid leave at the birth of a child. Today, men in paid employment are entitled to both partner and parental leave, totalling 3.5 months of paid leave. Studies, including by the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands, indicate that fathers taking leave improves equality at home and at work, with positive effects on the economy and national wealth.
The government proposes lowering benefits for those earning more than EUR5,294 gross per month. The highest earners could see a reduction of EUR926. For example, a person earning EUR6,617 gross per month would receive EUR3,705.52 in leave pay, a 44 percent loss. Those earning between 5,294 and EUR6,617 would also see reductions, but less severe.
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Young people pushed to the back of Britain's jobs queue
Rising employment costs are shutting young people out of the UK jobs market, with business groups warning that a toxic combination of minimum wage increases, higher employer National Insurance contributions, and new legislation is making companies increasingly reluctant to take a chance on inexperienced workers.
The British Chambers of Commerce forecasts unemployment will hit 5.5% this year, with young people bearing the brunt. The figures are already stark: nearly 957,000 16- to 24-year-olds are currently out of work, and the Federation of Small Businesses reports that 26% of its members were employing fewer staff in the final quarter of 2025 than the previous quarter; the worst reading in the survey's ten-year history.
Business groups told MPs that as hiring costs rise, employers are simply raising the bar – seeking more qualified candidates with cleaner CVs, which systematically disadvantages younger applicants. The Employment Rights Act risks compounding the problem if it deters firms from offering the flexible, entry-level roles that young people disproportionately rely on. Around 780,000 retail jobs alone are held by 16- to 25-year-olds.
The findings land as a parliamentary committee investigates the rise of young people not in education, employment, or training – a cohort now approaching one million. Former health secretary Alan Milburn, appointed by the government to lead a review into youth unemployment, has warned that the generational social contract, each generation doing better than the last, is fracturing.
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Nevada puts AI in the unemployment benefits appeals chair
Nevada's employment agency is weeks away from deploying a Google-built AI tool to process unemployment benefit appeals, in a US$2.6 million project that promises to cut decision times from several hours to as little as five minutes.
The AI reviews hearing records, cross-references state law, and drafts a ruling – but a human referee must verify and approve every decision. Officials are emphatic that the machine does not have the final word.
Not everyone is reassured. State legislators have raised pointed concerns about the fact that claimants are neither informed nor asked for consent before their appeal goes through the AI-driven process. Independent experts have flagged additional risks around model bias and AI hallucination. The tool itself had a troubled development, missing its original summer 2024 launch date due to accuracy problems, and a separate AI invoicing project was scrapped altogether after failing to deliver.
With a renewed state oversight bill already being planned for next year's legislative session, Nevada's experiment looks set to become a test case in a much broader national debate about where AI belongs in public decision-making.
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Hungary's pay league table: doctors surge, politicians lead, workers lag behind
Wages in Hungary have risen substantially in recent years, though the pace of growth varies sharply by profession. Air traffic controllers and pilots sit at the top of the earnings table, with monthly gross salaries exceeding HUF3.4 million and HUF3.1 million respectively in 2024. Politicians, ministers, and state secretaries are not far behind, ranking third with an average monthly gross salary of HUF2.2 million.
The steepest pay rises over the 2019-2024 period belong to healthcare workers: general practitioners saw salaries climb by 227%, specialist doctors by 182%, and obstetricians-gynaecologists by 140%. Across the wider workforce, average gross pay rose from around HUF360,000 in 2019 to HUF647,000 by 2024 – an increase of roughly 80%.
The gap between those at the top and the average worker is stark: from March, MPs' basic salaries may rise by HUF180,000 – more than double the average employee pay rise of HUF70,000 – while the minimum wage edges up to HUF322,800. Prime Minister Orbán's total remuneration could exceed HUF8 million per month if his party secures re-election. Hungary's overall wage levels, meanwhile, remain modest by EU standards.
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