Court: Dutch company cannot pay less to their Hungarian truck drivers!
Based on the court’s decision, the Dutch Vanden Bosch has to pay hundreds of thousands of EUR to 10 of their Hungarian lorry drivers because they did not follow the country’s laws.
According to liner.hu, the ten Hungarian truck drivers were the employees of the Dutch company’s Hungarian subsidiary. Therefore, the firm paid less for them than their Dutch citizen employees. However, the country’s court decided that even though the drivers are employed officially in Hungary, the primary venue of their work is in the Netherlands. Therefore, they have to receive the salary their Dutch colleagues get.
The spokesperson of the trade union, which represented the Hungarian drivers, said that the ruling is not only beneficial for them, but also for
thousands of other Eastern-European truck drivers, who are employed and paid the same tricky way.
Featured image: illustration
Source: liner.hu
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The EU rule introduced in 2017 basically says that drivers who spend more than days a week outside their home country delivering to another member state and work for a company that is based in another member state must be be paid in accordance with what drivers doing the same job earn if they live in that member state. In this case the Netherlands. It was designed to stop lower wage countries undercutting the local labour markets. Many of the Eastern European countries fought tooth and nail against this – especially Romania and Poland – but failed. Which is good for the drivers.