What exactly changes as of 1 January 2026?
Logistiek.nl describes it as a package of reforms on three fronts. First, a new collective agreement for temporary workers, with tightened provisions on pay and employment conditions. Second, an improved pension scheme via StiPP, allowing temporary workers to build up pension entitlements earlier and more fully. Third, stricter rules giving flexible workers greater certainty about their contract type and availability. That third point is immediately felt on the shop floor: the scope for deploying flexible staff at short notice without contractual obligations is becoming narrower. For sectors such as warehousing and distribution, where demand peaks are a constant reality, this requires a different approach to workforce planning.
Why does this hit logistics harder than other sectors?
The logistics sector has traditionally been heavily dependent on flexible labour. Seasonal peaks, night shifts, last-minute runs: the model is built on rapid scaling up and down. At the same time, external cost pressures continue to accumulate. ING signals a sharp cost increase in road transport for 2026, partly driven by the truck levy. Evofenedex points to growing requirements around CSRD reporting and sustainable packaging. Timocom identifies an increasing need for cost transparency towards clients. All of that pressure lands on companies that still manage their workforce planning largely by hand, in separate spreadsheets or via email with staffing agencies. The Flexwet now adds a new layer of compliance: you must be able to demonstrate that the correct collective agreement pay scale is applied, that StiPP contributions are accurate, and that contract types comply with the new security rules. This is not an HR problem; it is a data problem.
What does this mean for day-to-day planning and administration?
In practice, planners and HR staff must maintain more records: which flexible worker is on which pay scale, how many weeks they have been deployed, which pension threshold has been reached, and which contract carries which security obligation. When that information is scattered across a staffing agency portal, an internal spreadsheet, and a planner's calendar, mistakes are inevitable. Not because people are careless, but because the system cannot handle it. The answer is not to assign more people to track everything manually. The answer is to ensure data is held in one place, structured, so that a system performs the checks and the planner only needs to act when something deviates. That is precisely where AI Workers intervene: they read incoming information from staffing agencies, match it against the internal planning, and flag deviations before they become problems. The planner decides; the system does the groundwork.
When is a system not the solution?
To be direct: if the underlying processes are not yet in order, software will not fix anything. An AI Worker processing data from a staffing agency that does not itself deliver structured data lacks the raw material it needs. The first step is always to agree on what data you receive, when, in what format, and who is responsible for corrections. Only once those agreements are in place does automation make sense. This sounds obvious, but in practice many companies skip this step and buy a system first. The system then runs on incomplete input and produces incomplete output. The Flexwet makes this more urgent: if data agreements with your staffing agencies are vague, you will soon face compliance risks you did not anticipate.
Three things you can do now
Start small and concrete. First, map out how many flexible workers you deploy, through how many staffing agencies, and what information you receive from each. Step two: check per agency whether their reporting aligns with what you need to meet the new collective agreement and StiPP obligations. Step three: identify where the manual process currently breaks down, and what you can structure without building a large system. Sometimes a clear spreadsheet template is sufficient for the first few months. When volumes grow or exceptions start to accumulate, it is time to consider a structured solution. The logistics sector already faces enough external pressure in 2026: the truck levy, CSRD, tight margins. The Flexwet adds a manageable but unavoidable administrative burden on top of that. Getting your data in order now buys you room to handle everything else throughout the year.