In Summary

Road transport in the EU employs over 5 million professional bus, coach and freight drivers. Sadly not all of these jobs are high quality. The road transport sector is full of wage exploitation, social dumping and poor working conditions.

One unhappy image that has quickly become associated with road transport is that of truck drivers who spend their weekends eating and sleeping in their vehicle beside busy roads and motorways. Conditions are often shocking, and this practice is becoming even more frequent due to so-called letterbox companies. This business model, designed to avoid some countries’ higher wages and standards, makes road transport a hotbed of social dumping.

Nevertheless, the road transport sector is booming, with unprecedented growth in the volume of freight and the number of passengers. This has gradually led to an increase in drivers’ working hours, to a deterioration of the quality of rest and has negatively impacted the time our professional drivers spend with their families.

There is a huge body of EU law that sets out decent working conditions in road transport, but controls and enforcement lag behind. Now the EU Mobility Package, a wholesale reform of the sector, has endangered even these protections, with liberalising voices in industry and politics calling for less rest and flexibility to pay cross-border drivers’ less money.

Against this backdrop, the ETF’s role is to campaign for the improvement of working conditions in the sector, that can border on slavery. We organise drivers and represent them in our dialogue with the industry. Last but not least, we campaign for better EU laws and better enforcement of these rules.