The EU has good laws
ed* No. 01/2025 – Chapter 4
The EU Framework Directive on occupational safety and health provides a crucial legal foundation for protecting the health and safety of employees. It also obliges employers to run risk assessments, implement measures to prevent risks and to develop safety concepts. They are supplemented by various specific guidelines, some of which are actually sector specific. There are also special rules applicable to road haulage.
Posted workers have the same protection rights as local workers. The Posting of Workers Directive contains binding rules regarding employment and working conditions.
We have to pay particular attention to the most difficult contexts, such as complex and long subcontracting chains. We also must work towards implementing effective measures for combating abusive subcontracting in Europe and ensure fair rights for all workers.
Posting notification
The posting notification should contain personal and company-related data, including the location and the duration of the service. Each member state decides exactly what this includes. The employer must notify the authorities in the country of posting in advance using the national online notification portals. In Germany, this is the Costums’s Minimum Wage Notification Portal. Since 1 July 2023, road haulage and passenger transport companies that have an EU Community Licence required for Europe-wide transporting have been able to do this by using a standardised process that is an electronic interface included in the EU’s Internal Market Information System (IMI).2
Its enforcement directive was adopted in 2014 in order to improve the practical implementation of the posting rules. This has led to an increased focus on control and monitoring issues, as well as joint liability in subcontracting chains. EU Directive 2020/1057 also formulates exemptions from the posting rules for the road haulage sector, e.g. for both goods and passenger transit traffic.
The problems on Europe’s roads have resulted in the EU tightening its rules. Mobility Package Part I included a regular right for drivers to return to their place of residence, and a ban on cabin sleeping came into force on 20 August 2020. Stricter rules have also been applied to exceeding driving times since then. Mobility Package II introduced longer rest periods, which have been mandatory since 21 February 2022 if the lorry is loaded and unloaded in the same foreign country. Border crossings must be documented in the tachographs. The minimum wage of the host country has generally applied, with a few exceptions, e.g. for transit journeys, since February 2022. The final provisions of the Mobility Package will come into force in the middle of this year.