National Union of Road Transporters in Romania (UNTRR) asks President Klaus Iohannis to include on the agenda of talks with French President François Hollande, the cancelling of the application of the Macron Law to the Romanian companies which conduct international freight transport.
UNTRR believes that through the application by France of a minimum wage in transports, the sovereignty of an EU Member State is violated by another Member State and calls on the Romanian authorities to intervene in favour of suspending the application of the Macron Law, Agerpres informs.
The transporters warn that protectionist measures in road transport adopted by countries like France and Germany aim at “increasing the operating costs of Romanian transporters in order to reduce their competitiveness and ultimately remove them from the market and not to increase the welfare of professional drivers.”
“The road transport industry in Romania requires the support of President Klaus Iohannis in asking the French President for urgent measures to cancel the Macron Law enforcement in road transport. This protectionist legislation is inappropriate, unjust, it limits the European freedoms and bring us all only negative consequences,” the UNTRR Secretary General Radu Dinescu said.
The transporters say the UNTRR and European industry road transport steps are not against the European regulations that Romania and Eastern European carriers, including Romanian, respect, but they are against the national protectionist interpretations of European regulations as well as the law on minimum wage in Germany (MiLoG) or France (Macron).
“Precisely because these laws violate the EU rules, the European Commission has opened an infringement procedure against Germany and, this month, has taken legal action against France,” reads the UNTRR release.
Fresh protests against the mandatory liability insurance rates
Transporters have protested again on Monday on city belts countrywide with lorries travelling at slow speed, against the increases of the mandatory liability insurance (RCA) rates. The employers’ associations – UNTRR, APTE 2002, FORT, ARTRI, APULUM – ask the government to issue an emergency ordinance in order to freeze the RCS tariffs at the average level of the Milliman report.
“The current emergency ordinance, published on the website of the Finance Ministry, is a general one and does not limit the RCS tariffs, the road transporters are dissatisfied with it, and therefore on September 15, 2016 will organize a national protest against the RCS tariffs,” a release from UNTRR reads.
The transporters have already announced they would not give up the large-scale protests countrywide on September 15.