Remuneration of Drivers in Road Freight Transport in the EU

Remuneration of road transport drivers has been a hot topic since the EU's enlargement in 2004 when the new Member States strongly influenced the international road freight transport in Western Europe. The market opening to carriers from the new Member States has raised concerns that national carriers will lose their position in the original markets. Truck drivers from Eastern Europe have proven to be much less expensive in terms of wages and social protection. Therefore, Western European countries have started to make efforts to protect their carriers by restricting cabotage transport. Moreover, since 2015, Germany, France and other countries have begun to apply national law to drivers of international road transport. In Germany and France, some laws determine the minimum hourly gross wage. Therefore, this paper focuses on analysing hourly wages in road freight transport in Western Europe (Austria, Germany, Belgium, France) and Eastern Europe (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary). The analysis is carried out based on real data on 126,600 transport companies from 2014 to 2018. International road freight transport has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the analysis focuses on the period before 2019. In the study, numerical characteristics of the average wage development time series are used, such as the chronological average and the average growth rate. The method of analysis of variance is applied to compare the countries. The study results show that there have been such significant differences in road transport in recent years that Eastern carriers cannot meet Western countries' set conditions. In addition, the wage growth over time is approximately the same, suggesting that Western member countries cannot correspond to the average wages of Eastern countries neither now nor in the near future. The research results are useful in creating fair conditions for the EU single market in road freight transport.