Ok this is a bit of a challenge. We have an employee who is off on maternity leave but she plans to return to work soon. She says she will be working from home-no problem so far. But home will be in Germany. What do we need to do- do we just follow our normal homeworker procedures based on UK law or will we have to work according to German law and what might that law be?

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Why is it these days that whenever anyone mentions "homeworking", there's an immediate presumption of computer work and that the DSE Regs/EU parent Directive will be applicable?

For shame! There is a varied and valuable "cottage" industry across Europe covering moulded products, music, arts and crafts (to name but a few). "Low-skilled manual jobs" indeed!

....and how many people are employed to do this work? The numbers are so low that DSE is a pretty safe guess. I know there are plenty of people who do arts, crafts and music (many self employed) so perhaps the low-skilled comment was unfair. However, they remain statistically irrelevant in the global view of homeworking.

Ron And in the interests of further debate, I suspect most of the people you mention are low skilled and self-employed, so my statement stands. I understand there are a lot of people doing pretty nasty jobs at home around the world, but the amount of highly skilled artists and craftsmen that are actually employed by a business and can work at home across international boundaries is very low compared to the amount of keyboard-bashers who can. Therefore it is entirely natural to presume that homeworkers in the the context of the OP are DSE users.