Yesterday, June 16th, the European Parliament’s plenary voted, for the second time around, against the European Commission’s proposal to bar self-employed workers from the Directive 2002/15 on the organization of the working time of persons performing mobile road transport activities. The latter sets out an average 48-hour limit to the work week over four weeks and supervises night work. The 2002 directive provided for the application of minimum standards to self-employed drivers as of march 23, 2009, but at the same time it specified that working time meant “the time from the beginning to the end of work, during which the self employed driver is at his workstation, at the disposal of the client and exercising his functions or activities other than general administrative work that is not directly linked to the specific transport operation under way.” To avoid this application, which it thinks would be too heavy for small businesses, the European Commission presented, on October 15, 2008, a draft directive barring self-employed workers from the scope of the 2002 directive and offering, in exchange, to include fake self-employed workers in the definition of mobile workers.
it specified that working time meant “the time from the beginning to the end of work, during which the self employed driver is at his workstation, at the disposal of the client and exercising his functions or activities other than general administrative work that is not directly linked to the specific transport operation under way.”
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