The members of the European Parliament who voted to include owner truck and bus drivers in the EU Working Time Directive had hugely damaged Ireland’s road transport industry and threatened up to one third of the jobs in the industry.

This was stated by Marian Harkin MEP when she strongly criticised the vote in favour of including owner drivers as bad law in relation to enforcement and extremely harmful to those attempting to earn a livelihood in the transport business in Ireland.

She said:- “Today the majority of MEPs voted to limit the working time of owner drivers to an average of 48 hours per week.  This will include any waiting time for loading or unloading as well as any time spent loading or unloading their vehicles, any cleaning or technical maintenance of their vehicles, any administrative work related to the job in hand, as well as all their driving time.  The plethora of regulations and red tape involved for owner drivers will seriously erode driving time and consequently the earnings of owner drivers.

“False arguments were made by those lobbying to defeat the European Commission’s objective of creating realistic legislation in the road transport sector and this can be seen in the fact that the Road Safety Authority did not object to the Commission’s proposal.  Owner drivers are already subject to the EU Driving Time Directive and requiring them to adhere to a jobs destroying Working Time measure is a ludicrous case of MEPs imposing the kind of unacceptable European bureaucracy and red tape which many of them are very fond of criticising”, Marian Harkin concluded.