Leszek Socha is taking up the cause of a professional group overlooked and forgotten in Poland and Europe: TIR truck drivers.
“Long-distance international road transport is an overlooked, unmentioned, yet real pillar of Europe’s economy,” explains Leszek Socha. “Does anyone realize that we are the largest professional group without occupational mortality statistics, because we die across Europe, while coffins containing our bodies do not land at Okęcie and parliament does not pay tribute to drivers? We are not seeking honours, but an ordinary expression of respect and compliance with labour law, which does not function in many companies. Many companies operate so that a driver does not feel too confident, because then he will demand all components of his remuneration. The drivers themselves do not exist. Only carriers exist, but a carrier is not a TIR driver. As a member of the Citizens’ Association of Local Initiatives VE-TO in Nowogrodziec and, at the same time, a professional driver in international transport, I would like to present parliamentarians of the Republic of Poland with the actual situation in this industry, hoping that they will address it and make this profession more humane and safer, both for drivers themselves and for other road users,” Socha adds.
Leszek Socha raises all the difficulties TIR drivers experience in their work. He also speaks about society’s negative perception of representatives of this profession.
“We know the driver of a 40-tonne truck as a dangerous beast that poses a threat to decent drivers,” Socha writes. “As a professional group, we are disregarded. The pandemic demonstrated this clearly. No one at any level of state or local administration even mentioned us drivers. We drove across Europe, came into contact with infected people and returned to our families, while people spoke only about the owners of transport companies, our employers. Everything was fine for them at the time. A miner dies: cameras, information, commentary, families receive financial and psychological support. Truck drivers, who have no organisation able to deal with their affairs, die quietly, while their widows and orphans grieve quietly and alone, bringing their husbands’ bodies back to the country at their own expense,” the community activist stresses.
Despite the mockery directed at TIR drivers, it should be understood that they must be resourceful. Travelling through different countries with different languages and regulations, they must deal with ferries, trains, tunnels, tolls, inspections and customs clearances. Unfortunately, drivers are most often mentioned in the context of overtaking on motorways.
“We are punished for freight forwarders’ mistakes,” Socha says. “We pay out of our own pockets. Parliaments maliciously create ever-new inspection institutions aimed at drivers as the source of all evil. They care for us so much that we urinate into bottles and defecate into bags in the trailer. There are many humiliations I will not mention. No one cares how we are supposed to arrive; we are simply expected to arrive. Collisions involving a TIR are always the driver’s fault, as if he were driving a passenger car. No European parliament has introduced educational regulations for passenger-car drivers explaining that, from the position of a 40-tonne truck driver, other road users are often invisible. Yet we are assessed for offences in the same way,” Socha adds.
Legal solutions in the Labour Code
Leszek Socha proposes a series of solutions to the Labour Code and declares his willingness to help create solutions for this professional group through the VE-TO Association in Nowogrodziec.
- requiring all companies receiving heavy-goods transport to obligatorily provide rooms for drivers, with sanitary and rest facilities, while they wait for loading and unloading, regardless of the time of day, and to provide opportunities to bathe and heat up a hot meal or drink
- improving parking infrastructure with sanitary facilities or sanitary points in proportion to the number of parking spaces
- equipping car parks with spaces for refrigerated trailers where they can be connected to the electrical supply in order to silence the refrigeration unit during rest breaks
- creating a European network providing information about parking spaces and requiring them to be reported for freight forwarders’ use, while obliging freight forwarders to plan rest periods and reserve parking spaces
- requiring the services to help find parking spaces in exceptional situations, such as traffic jams, accidents or breakdowns
- requiring carriers to record conversations between freight forwarders and drivers, as well as to communicate decisions in writing, by SMS or text message, in order to remove responsibility from the driver, because freight forwarders’ decisions are largely what lead drivers to break the law
- requiring company management to admit trucks to company car parks, but only those engaged in international transport, and to report these spaces to the system under threat of financial penalties, with parking fees charged according to the tariff
- when traffic jams last longer than five hours, requiring the road owner to deploy portable toilets
- maintaining access roads to a standard ensuring safety, or closing these road sections and reporting them through a pan-European information system
- introducing a clear system for accounting for work in companies
- including information about the dangers arising from trucks’ dimensions and blind spots in training for non-professional drivers
- taking into account during road incidents whether, because of the truck driver’s limited field of vision, the driver was aware of the developing danger
- simplifying tachograph operation so that it is limited to inserting the driver card at the beginning and end of driving; the remaining actions are unnecessary because they merely enable inspectors to issue fines for errors in operating the digital tachograph, even though the records show compliance with the regulations and are stored in the system and visible to the carrier and inspectors