Menno de Wijs

As an employer, you can choose to bear the financial risks associated with sickness and incapacity for work of current and former employees yourself. This is known as self-insurance. This option can be financially attractive and gives you greater control over the reintegration of current and former employees. At the same time, self-insurance entails responsibilities and risks. What exactly does self-insurance for Sickness Benefits (Ziektewet) and WGA benefits involve? What are the advantages, and what pitfalls should employers be aware of? In this blog, we explain how self-insurance works and what you need to consider.

Three companies—Google, Amazon and Microsoft—together account for 70% of the European cloud market. European providers each hold a market share of approximately 2%. This is more than just a market statistic. It reflects a balance of power that directly affects who can, in practice, access the data held by Dutch public sector organisations and which laws govern that access. The Dutch government has decided that this needs to change. In a memorandum published in June 2026, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations’ NDS Cloud Programme explains how the government intends to build its own sovereign cloud service. The document is concrete in its approach, setting out a timeline, a selected scenario, a technical strategy and an honest acknowledgement of the challenges involved.

The Enterprise Chamber of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal (the “Enterprise Chamber”) delivered its ruling on 28 April 2026 in a case brought by the Temporary Works Council (the “TOR”) of the Identification and Screening of Asylum Seekers Service (Dienst Identificatie en Screening Asielzoekers, “DISA”) (ECLI:NL:GHAMS:2026:1105). The Enterprise Chamber ruled that the TOR had no right to be consulted on the decision to treat the reorganisations at DISA and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) as separate processes, without transferring personnel between them. According to the Enterprise Chamber, the decision concerned the allocation of public-law responsibilities between government services and therefore fell within the scope of the political primacy principle set out in Article 46d of the Dutch Works Councils Act (Wet op de ondernemingsraden, or WOR). Notably, however, the Enterprise Chamber described the decision-making process as “highly careless”. This finding did not lead to a different legal conclusion.