Since the presentation on Monday 23 March of the Commission’s guidelines on ‘green lanes’ (see EUROPE 12452/14), an initiative to facilitate the movement of goods during the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) has made repeated calls for the protection of lorry drivers.
“They need masks and gloves”; “Keep goods moving, but respect drivers!”; “They need to wash, sleep, and eat!” urged the organisation several times this week via Twitter.
On Tuesday 24 March, it sent a letter to the relevant European Commissioner, Adina Vălean, expressing its concerns.
The ETF regrets in particular the Commission’s call for the reduction to a strict minimum of health checks at borders and for lorry drivers to remain confined to their vehicles for periods of up to 30 days.
The European institution also calls on states to “ensure the availability of adequate sanitary facilities and food supplies for transport workers on the main transport routes”, but nothing is being done to make this compulsory, said Cristina Tilling, representative of the ETF’s road section.
“The Commission should know that facilities are closed down everywhere in Europe. So in the majority of cases, drivers do not even have the opportunity to use a toilet for nine or ten hours, which is the regular driving time, let alone to do their shopping and use sanitary facilities, for those who spend 30 days in their cabins”, it explained to EUROPE.
“We did not see any concern on the part of the Commission for this particular issue. We would have expected it”, Tilling added, noting that drivers are “deeply concerned” by the requirement to sleep and eat in their vehicles. A practice that is more fully supervised under normal circumstances.
Another practice pointed out was the relaxation of the rules on driving and resting time (see EUROPE 12453/6), which has already been introduced temporarily by 20 countries.
In its letter, the ETF reiterates its recommendations on this point. The organisation had already insisted that such flexibility must remain exceptional, that it should only be implemented in the Member States most affected by the epidemic, and that it should be subject to “mandatory pre-notification”.
“Make their mission less stressful and safer”
“The problem”, according to Cristina Tilling, is that, the Commission which needs to “show an equal interest between industry and the workforce”, did not respect this principle in its communication.
The Commission does not agree. The 'green lanes' guidelines are precisely intended to make the job of transport workers “less stressful and safer”, it argued.
Most of the directives “focus on transport workers and how their work can be facilitated as much as possible in these extraordinary circumstances”, a press officer told EUROPE.
They reiterated, for example, that the Commission document stresses the need to strengthen hygiene measures and to review working conditions for workers on all transport platforms, and pointed out that “Commissioner Vălean paid special tribute to the crucial work of transport workers”.
The ETF, for its part, invited the Commissioner to “express [her] gratitude to the transport workers by meeting with their representatives and starting to work on concrete solutions to support them”.
See the Commission’s guidelines: https://bit.ly/2wnCh7n (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)