How a law on truck movements divided the EU

BRUSSELS — A law setting rules on how truckers operate set off an east-west battle between European Union member countries and laid bare a profound conflict at the heart of the bloc’s internal market. On Friday, the EU’s highest court will decide who’s in the right.

The Court of Justice of the EU is delivering a long-awaited ruling on 15 overlapping legal challenges targeting a collection of reforms known as the Mobility Package. The reforms aimed to improve truck drivers’ lives and tackle unfair competition practices with new rules on driver rest times, their right to local salary levels and their ability to circulate within other countries to carry out deliveries.

The package was viewed very differently depending on which part of the EU was doing the looking. For many West European countries, it was a strategy to prevent the EU’s free movement from undermining worker rights. Many Central Europeans, in contrast, saw it as an effort to protect western trucking companies at the expense of shipping firms from new member countries.

Seven EU members sued; many more intervened in court.

Rarely has a law “given rise to such a grouped and intense contentious reaction at EU level,” a top court adviser, Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella, noted in his November opinion.

He warned that the debate raises “the risk of a split between two visions of the European Union … on an issue that is fundamental to the internal market.”

In his opinion, Pitruzzella suggested ditching an obligation to regularly return trucks to their registered base — something welcomed by Lithuania and Malta. 

But French, German and Nordic industry groups argued the advocate general didn’t find fault with the content of the measure and warned that scrapping it would “open the door to more social dumping and nomadic driving in Europe.”

Now — four years after the package’s adoption and more than seven years after it was first proposed — the court gets a say. It’s under no obligation to echo an advocate general’s opinion, but it often does.

A little refresher may be in order. Here’s what you need to know.

1. What’s it all about?

The Mobility Package includes several reforms to improve truckers’ — undeniably tough — working conditions. The new measures banned drivers from taking long rests in their cabins and mandated their regular return home.

It also introduced new restrictions on pickups and drop-offs within other EU countries, known as cabotage. The most controversial measure demands that trucks return to their company’s registered base at least once every eight weeks. 

That was an effort to prevent so-called letterbox companies from registering in low-cost countries despite operating on a near-permanent basis on the other side of the Continent.

But on the bloc’s periphery, that was seen as a protectionist measure to cut them out of the internal market and saddle their transport sectors with millions in added costs. Even the European Commission questioned the measure after its adoption, eliciting fresh outrage from negotiators. Now-outgoing Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean went as far as preparing plans to scrap it.

2. Why it matters

Trucks carrying goods from one country to the next will typically combine that international delivery with other deliveries along the way to bring down costs and avoid empty runs. But when foreign truckers pick up and deliver goods within another country, they’re also doing a transport job that could have been carried out by a local company. As a result, the debate about the mistreatment and unequal remuneration standards of truck drivers has become intertwined with discussions about unfair competition.

3. Why it was so politically divisive

In EU lawmaking, negotiators’ positions can often be traced back to their political affiliation or the European Parliament’s typically more ambitious stance. But in the long-running talks on the Mobility Package, Council of the EU and Parliament negotiators — and even commissioners — split along geographic lines. It took negotiators years to find a carefully crafted deal that passed muster with enough countries. Take one piece of the puzzle out and the whole thing could come crashing down, they have warned.

4. Who’s involved?

Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland lodged a total of 15 challenges with the court. Estonia and Latvia, the two other countries which voted against the package, added their support to some of those challenges. Belgium backed Malta in its challenge of one measure.

Other countries, including Germany, Italy, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and Austria, banded together in a France-led “road alliance” and turned to the court in defense of the legislation.

5. It’s bigger than transport

Countries supporting the package called for measures to improve truckers’ work conditions, framing it as an effort to halt a broader “race to the bottom” across the sector.

Their warnings centered on worries that the bloc’s free-movement rules could harm social rights and erode support for the EU. They argued that cheaper workers moving from poorer EU countries undermine the working conditions of their own drivers.

But countries questioning the reform saw that as protectionism. They complained that older EU countries treated the European project’s promise of free competition in a common EU market as something they’d only defend if it was to their advantage.

That makes the stakes very high.

“Over and above the legal issues at stake, it is therefore also, in a way, the pursuit of a desire to live together on common economic and social foundations that is at stake in these actions,” Pitruzzella cautioned in his opinion.