The road transport industry is in a crisis that demands urgent action to protect workers and tackle extreme exploitation, safety risks, and the ongoing strain of labour shortages caused by a lack of decent pay and conditions in the industry.
Today trade unionists approved a bold five-year plan to address these challenges head-on at the ITF’s Road Transport Conference in Marrakech.
As part of their vision for delivering on the ITF’s six global demands, delegates committed to coordinate internationally over the next five years to grow union membership, exercise power, and transform their industry.
“At the core of this plan is the fight against the dangerous and unsustainable pressures that road transport workers face every day,” said ITF Road Section Chair Flemming Overgaard of Denmark’s 3F. “From fatigue caused by excessively long hours to deaths on the road due to unrealistic time pressures, the consequences are life-threatening.”
Unions not only identified the problems but also committed to take decisive action to shift power to workers and enforce protections across global supply chains.
The sectoral strategy focuses on building leverage through a comprehensive approach including data-driven mapping and organising, raising public awareness, pressuring corporate targets, and demanding new regulations that secure safer working conditions.
One key priority is growing the global Safe Rates campaign pioneered by truck drivers to establish fair pay and decent conditions.
Safe Rates is a model for setting fair standards for pay and working conditions and putting obligations on the companies at the top of supply chains to reduce pressures that lead to fatigue and unsafe on-road practices.
“We are going to scale-up our wins in Australia, Korea, Brazil, Paraguay, the United States, Canada and Japan by putting Safe Rates on the map across the world and making it a truly global standard,” said Overgaard.
The campaign will now expand to target exploitation throughout all aspects of road transport, including last mile delivery, global logistics, and the operations of companies using non-standard forms of employment.
Affiliates will be supported to organise, negotiate and build leverage with global logistics companies with the goal of raising labour, human rights and safety standards across the industry – including for subcontracted, precarious and informal workers.
Company-specific global and regional networks will help to promote solidarity between unions with common employers.
As a new priority area, the road transport strategy identifies improving rights, conditions and safety in long-distance road passenger transport. Business models based on subcontracting and outsourcing – embodied by multinationals such as Flixbus – require a coordinated union response to challenge long working hours, irregular schedules, short rest breaks, fatigue, lack of access to sanitation facilities and pressure to engage in unsafe practices.
At the conference, delegates adopted a motion to increase support for organising of cross-border and informal road transport workers, often the most vulnerable to exploitation.
By expanding regional training programs, collecting best practices, and executing strategic campaigns, the ITF and its affiliates will ensure workers across borders can organise effectively to improve local conditions.
NETWON (Nepal) and the Transport Employees Union Bihar (India) jointly submitted the motion with a goal to achieve fair standards and protections for cross-border drivers.
Another critical component of the plan is advancing the inclusion of women in road transport. Female workers are often underrepresented in the sector, facing barriers that range from a lack of infrastructure and poor work-life balance to outright violence, harassment and gender-based discrimination.
Delegates committed to removing these barriers and ensuring that women play an active role in campaigns and negotiations that will shape the industry’s future.
Newly elected global women’s representative Karina Moyano from the Federación Nacional de Camioneros said: "I will fight for the cause of women around the world. In Argentina we resist all political pressure put on trade unions from the right wing government, and women are heavily involved in that resistance. On 30 October all parts of the transport sector will be on strike in the country - and we will need the support of the ITF to make our government listen to the demands of trade unions."
Delegates elected Julian Ehret (ver.di, Germany) to Vice Chair for Urban Transport, and launched a digital campaign against India’s Hit and Run law.
“The need for this global strategy is clear in light of the ‘Amazon effect’ which has resulted in a race to the bottom, forcing transport companies to cut corners on wages and safety to meet impossible delivery demands,” said Noel Coard, ITF Inland Transport Sections Secretary.
“This race has had disastrous consequences for road transport workers worldwide, and unions are fighting back.”
