Bogotá Just Legalized What Dublin Is Quietly Walking Back

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇮🇪 Ireland

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In 2025, Colombia's Congress passed a law giving workers the right to disconnect their phones after hours. In the same stretch of months, Ireland's Central Statistics Office quietly confirmed that the number of people working on-site had crawled back to pre-pandemic levels. One country is legislating its way into remote work. The other, having pioneered the legal right to request it, appears to be legislating its way back to the office chair. Neither seems to have noticed the other is moving in the opposite direction.

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇮🇪 Ireland

Colombia: The Law Arrived Before the Habit Did

According to DANE, the number of Colombians working via teletrabajo or home-based arrangements grew from roughly 1.4 million in 2019 to more than 4.2 million in 2025 — a jump large enough that the government decided it needed rules to match. The 2025 Ley de Teletrabajo introduced a formal right to digital disconnection, meaning employers are no longer supposed to demand tasks outside agreed hours except in defined exceptions, and it obliges companies to supply or compensate for equipment. A companion labor reform, Ley 2466, goes further, requiring firms above a certain headcount to actually offer teletrabajo rather than merely permit it. This is regulation catching up to a fait accompli, which is generally the correct order of operations, if not the usual one.

None of this erases the cultural substrate underneath. Colombian professional life still runs substantially on personal rapport — a preference for face-to-face contact and voice notes over terse written messages that predates any pandemic and shows no sign of retiring. Gallup's most recent global workplace data puts Latin American and Caribbean workers among the most engaged in the world, at 30%, alongside notably high "thriving" scores, even as the region also reports moderate stress. Colombia has, in effect, built a legal remote-work infrastructure on top of a culture that still prizes the in-person handshake — an arrangement that produces genuinely warm colleagues who will also, with some regularity, call you instead of texting.

Ireland: The Culture Arrived Before the Retreat Did

Ireland got here from the other direction. The Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023 gave employees the statutory right to request remote or flexible work from their first day of employment, and a statutory review published in March 2026 found the system working better than skeptics expected: 94% of requests were approved in full or in part. Ireland has also topped European rankings for work-life balance, scoring 82.89 on the 2025 Global Life-Work Balance Index with an average working week of just 34.3 hours, and it climbed 17 places in InterNations' 2025 Expat Insider survey, driven partly by that same remote work legislation.

And yet the CSO's own Labour Force Survey shows the number of people working from home slipping — down 1.6% to 956,700 in the final quarter of 2025 — while separate CSO figures released in February 2026 confirmed that on-site attendance had climbed back to pre-pandemic levels for the first time. Irish commentators have taken to calling the workaround "hushed hybrid": a manager quietly letting a trusted employee skip the office against official policy, an arrangement that is legally unnecessary given the statutory right, yet apparently more comfortable for everyone involved than actually invoking it. Ireland wrote the rulebook and then, in practice, started ignoring parts of it in both directions at once.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the irony sharpens. Colombia is using new law to drag a traditionally relationship-driven, in-person work culture toward remote flexibility, backed by real numbers — 4.2 million teleworkers and rising. Ireland already had both the law and the culture, arguably the best work-life balance scores in Europe, and is nonetheless watching workers trickle back to desks it worked hard to get people out of. Hofstede Insights' country comparison data situates Colombia as considerably higher on collectivism and power distance than Ireland, which tracks: Colombian flexibility policy still assumes the boss's approval matters and the team dinner still happens, while Irish flexibility policy assumes individual autonomy is default and needs no ceremony.

The counterintuitive lesson is that legislating a right to work from home does not guarantee people will use it, and legislating disconnection does not guarantee anyone actually disconnects. Colombia is optimistic regulation chasing a genuine behavioral shift. Ireland is mature regulation quietly losing ground to office gravity, mortgage-adjacent commuting realities, and the particular pull of Dublin's tech offices offering free lunch as a counter-incentive.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/digitalnomad — A Medellín coworking regular described video calls dying mid-sentence during power outages, and a space that permanently smelled of diesel from the backup generator running out back — charming until you're presenting to a client.

Quora — Someone weighing a remote programming gig in Colombia was struck less by the work culture than by the arithmetic: a one-bedroom apartment in Bogotá for under $400 a month, which changes the entire calculation of what a modest foreign salary is actually worth.

Quora — An American considering a temporary move to Dublin while keeping a US remote job got tangled in tax residency questions before even booking a flight, and came away advising anyone doing the same to sort out double-taxation exposure months in advance, not after arrival.

InterNations Expat Insider — A contributor noted Ireland's jump up the 2025 rankings came specifically from career opportunity and the new remote work law, but flagged that the housing search ate more time and money than the job hunt itself — plan the flat before the flight.

Blind — A tech worker's hybrid-experience thread described a team operating on an unwritten understanding that nobody enforced the stated office days, right up until a new manager arrived and enforced all of them at once, with no warning.

Conclusion

If you are moving for the job, the practical difference is this: in Colombia you are betting on new rules catching up to an old culture, and the rules are generous on paper but young in practice. In Ireland you are betting on an old, generous system holding steady against a very current pull back toward the office, and the CSO's own numbers suggest that bet is no longer a sure thing. Neither country's brochure will tell you which way the wind is currently blowing inside your specific office, so ask before you sign.

If a friend asked me over a drink, I'd say: negotiate your remote days in writing regardless of which country you land in, because the law only protects the request — it says nothing about the manager who quietly stops honoring it eighteen months from now.