You're listening to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcast on social provisions and enforcement for road transport workers, including posted drivers.

Despite the measures in place, truck drivers in the EU face deteriorating working conditions and distortions of competition,

as current posting provisions and administrative requirements

are ill-suited to the mobile nature of their work.

To address these gaps, the European Commission has proposed a revamp of the old rules

to strengthen compliance and better align posted workers' conditions with those of local drivers.

Want to know more? Stay with us. The road transport sector employs 5 million people overall in the EU,

but the working conditions of drivers in Poland or Hungary

are very different to those enjoyed by their German or Swedish counterparts,

for example, as are the labour costs for those employing them.

Because of the mobile nature of the sector, the European Commission has long believed that

in order to create a fair, efficient and safe road transport sector, market rules must be

accompanied by strong social rules to protect workers' rights and ensure fair competition.

Current social provisions regulating maximum driving times and the use of tachographs,

as well as checks and controls on drivers and operators, were meant to ensure this.

The problem is that despite the 2006 enforcement directive, they haven't been applied equally

by all member states, which has led to worsening working conditions and distortions of competition.

The Commission also signalled that posting provisions and administrative requirements

are not really adapted to the mobile nature of road transport, creating unnecessary red

tape for operators and a range of barriers to cross-border services.

Fines for serious infringements of the rules such as manipulation of a tachograph also differ

greatly from one member state to another, varying from less than 600 euros in Lithuania to

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