Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 49 
3.4 Mobile work, home as workplace and domestic work  
The place of work — premises of the employer or any other place — is another major characteristic of 
working conditions, which significantly influences the risks and the preventive measures. This chapter 
takes a closer look at three types of work, that is, mobile work, private homes as workplace and domestic 
work, All pose — in a broad sense — similar challenges for OSH.77 
For OSH, the major question for all mobile and non -stationery work is: to what degree does the 
OSH level at these workplaces’ deviate from the OSH level at stationary workplaces ? Current OSH 
legislation illustrates these difficulties: The Workplace Directive78 excludes several types of mobile work, 
and the Display screen equipment directive79 was issued in 1990 and does not reflect the variety and 
specific OSH issues of digital equipment development of the past 30 years. Both directives are currently 
under revision.  
Mobile work is a standard characteristic of work in the construction and transport sector, extreme 
for workers in the maritime and other long-distance and international transport sectors, often in tourism 
and also for certain categories of sales personnel, and often standard for qualified craft workers during 
service or construction of plants and installations and during maintenance. 80 
Triggered by developments in  digital and communication technologies, several new types of mobile 
work have developed. In principle, the place of work can be anywhere, in a car, train, hotel, at  the 
premises of other employers, at remote office- like locations, or at the client’s workplace or at private 
homes of clients; it is not ‘place-bound’. Most of this mobile work still takes place in the contractual form 
of regular employment, but mobile work is also a major field for many new forms of new work contracts, 
triggered by the technological possibilities.  
Traditional home-based work consists of the production of small goods that —  from a technical point 
of view — can be produced in private homes (clothes, artisan work and very repetitive work like sorting). 
This work is performed for an enterprise or a person contracted by the enterprise for the organisation of 
home-based work and is located at the homes of the workers. It might require extra technical equipment, 
but sometimes usual private equipment is sufficient. The traditional home-based work very probably has 
decreased to a low level, the quantity of this type of home- based work is not monitored at EU  level.81 
Regulation of OSH for such home- based work has a long tradition in OSH legislation, mostly aim ed at 
achieving working conditions as similar as possible to the other employees in an enterprise, regarding 
wages, social protection, and safety and health.  
Work at, from and in homes.  We can distinguish major types: work at (own) home , either as 
independent work (self-employed) or classical home-based work; work from private home embedded 
in daily routine work processes in an enterprise or institution; and work in homes of others. Long-term 
care work, domestic work and teaching are large categories of work in homes; the work is performed in 
the private homes of clients. Regarding work that is done at home, from home and in homes , the 
application of some basic OSH standards has to take into account the dominantly private character of a 
home. This triggers the question of responsibility and supervision : Who is responsible for risk 
assessment and prevention measures? Is a supervision of compliance by state authoriti es in private 
homes legally possible?  
The craft workers who are doing technical services in homes of clients are statistically not counted as 
home workers but as workers at the premises of clients (Eurostat). In some important OSH aspects, it