Five years after the adoption of the European Union’s first Mobility Package and three years since its full implementation, road transport operators are still grappling with uncertainty surrounding the rules on driver posting. Designed to ensure fair working conditions across the EU, the rules remain complex, fragmented and difficult to interpret. Against this backdrop, the IRU and the ETF have issued a joint appeal to the European Commission, calling for urgent harmonisation of information on the minimum pay to be granted to posted drivers.
Their request was formalised in a letter addressed to Roxana Mînzatu, Executive Vice-President for Social Rights, Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, and to Apostolos Tzitzikostas, European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism. As social partners in the European sectoral social dialogue committee for road transport, IRU and ETF are asking the Commission to take the lead in establishing a clearer, more uniform and centralised system for enforcing pay regulations.
According to Raluca Marian, IRU’s Director of EU Advocacy, the root of the problem lies in the lack of harmonisation among the 27 Member States. “Five years after the adoption of the Mobility Package, employers and workers operating across European borders are still faced with the challenge of deciphering a myriad of national regulations,” she said. This situation undermines not only legal certainty but also fair competition and the protection of drivers’ rights.
The Mobility Package, approved in 2020, represents the most ambitious reform to date regarding social conditions for drivers in the road transport sector. The rules define when a driver is considered to be ‘posted’ in a host country and therefore entitled to receive a wage not lower than the national minimum in that country. However, it is up to each Member State to define and communicate clearly what that minimum wage level entails.
The result is a patchwork of national regulations that are often difficult to understand, with information scattered across various websites and sometimes outdated or incomplete. This regulatory opacity particularly affects small and medium-sized enterprises, which make up the bulk of the sector and lack the resources to hire specialised legal advisers.
To address this, IRU and ETF are proposing two concrete tools. The first is the adoption of a single EU-wide information template, which all Member States would be required to use and publish through a centralised European Commission portal. This template would provide comprehensive, up-to-date and easily understandable information on national minimum wages and their components. The second tool is a European wage calculator, complete with guidelines, to enable operators to apply the rules consistently across the Union.
According to the two organisations, the adoption of these tools would significantly reduce legal uncertainty, make life easier for operators and strengthen the coherence of the European single market. “The current system is so complex that even experts struggle to calculate the correct pay,” said Marian. “Companies, particularly smaller ones, are forced to rely on external consultants, incurring high costs with no guarantee of avoiding mistakes.”
