The Truck Driver from Baloga: Driving Through Time and Space

Abstract In this article, the concept of the law of the everyday is used to understand and describe how law shapes ordinary days in a person’s life. Reading the chapter ‘Baloga’ in Ben Judah’s This is Europe: The Way We Live Now , about a Romanian truck driver and his partner and co-driver, through a spatio-temporal lens provides insights into how their work and living conditions are largely governed by the detailed and comprehensive system of rules for workers and vehicles in the road transport sector (‘the Mobility Package’). To a significant extent, the Mobility Package consists of rules dependent on time and place: when and where the driver may operate the vehicle. The article takes one of its legal anchor points from the Mobility Package and the other from the European Union’s fundamental legal basis: the treaty-enshrined highly competitive social market economy – which, as the wording suggests, entails that extensive market-economic ambitions are to be balanced against social objectives. The rules in the Mobility Package constitute a legal expression of this pursuit of balance. At the same time, the market economy also entails additional spatio-temporal aspects: within the logistics sector, the optimal use of time and space is a decisive factor in maximising economic profit. Through the spatio-temporal lens and the bottom-up perspective implied by the law of the everyday, the article demonstrates the law’s extensive and highly concrete impact on most aspects of a long-distance truck driver’s life. It also highlights structural conditions inherent in the cross-border road transport sector, such as occupational risks, unequal treatment and a high social cost, as well as the ambivalent way in which the Mobility Package seeks to address them.