Who benefits from right-to-disconnect legislation in Europe? Cross-national and gendered effects on employee wellbeing

The effectiveness of labour regulation depends not only on the formal articulation of rights, but on the institutional arrangements through which those rights are enforced and distributed across workers. This is particularly salient for regulations governing working time and employee availability, where outcomes are shaped by power relations in the workplace and persistent gendered divisions of paid and unpaid labour. The introduction of right-to-disconnect (R2D) legislation in several European countries provides a valuable opportunity to examine how procedural labour rights operate across different industrial relations systems and how they generate gender-differentiated outcomes. Rather than constituting a single policy model, R2D provisions vary substantially in their reliance on collective bargaining, firm-level discretion and individual characteristics. Using data from the European Social Survey between 2010 and 2022 and exploiting the staggered introduction of R2D policies in France, Belgium, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, this study estimates effects on subjective wellbeing among employees in teleworkable occupations. Applying a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, the analysis identifies modest average improvements in wellbeing in countries where R2D provisions are embedded within stronger industrial relations systems. Gendered analyses show that these benefits accrue more consistently to men than to women, highlighting how digital labour regulation may interact with unequal distributions of paid and unpaid work.