Road Transport

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 conditions.

One unhappy image that has 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 becomes ever more common thanks 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 to negative impacts on the time our professional drivers spend with their families.

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

Against this backdrop, the ETF’s role is to campaign for the improvement of working conditions in the sector, which can border on slavery. We organise drivers and represent them in dialogue with the industry. And, last but not least, we campaign for a better EU law and better enforcement of those rules.