Every year, tens of billions of parcels move across Europe, and the price keeps falling. That sounds like good news. But there’s a lesson from an older industry (trucking) that we’re at risk of ignoring.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Europe opened up road freight to competition, creating one single market. Prices dropped, trucks were used more efficiently, and paperwork got simpler. On paper, it worked: liberalization genuinely lowered costs. But underneath, something else happened too.
Drivers got reclassified as “self-employed” even though they worked exactly like employees. Subcontracting chains got longer and harder to trace, often running through little more than letterbox companies. Wages got squeezed across borders. Companies could save around half their labor costs this way.
Nobody planned that outcome; it just happened, because the rules for opening the market were strict and enforced, while the rules protecting workers were left voluntary and largely unfunded. The clearest proof is enforcement itself: the US funds roadside inspections through a dedicated federal fuel tax and runs millions of checks a year, while in Europe enforcement was left to national budgets; and roadside checks quietly declined.
The reason this matters now is the EU’s Delivery Act, which is reshaping how the parcel and courier market works. The industry argues regulation isn’t needed. The market is competitive, anyone can enter, prices are fair. That may even be true, as far as it goes. But it misses the point. The trucking story was never really about market structure. It was about what happens when economic rules are enforced, and social rules aren’t.
The same warning signs are already visible in parcel delivery: platform couriers, subcontracted vans, cross-border wage differences. Without some form of shared responsibility up the delivery chain, making the company at the top answerable for conditions further down, and real funding behind enforcement, not just guidelines member states may or may not follow, we risk reproducing the exact same pattern. Add to that the hidden costs cities absorb: congestion, van traffic, failed doorstep deliveries. None of that shows up in the price of a parcel, but someone pays for it.
There’s a deeper gap too: nobody actually has good data. Contract prices are confidential, labor conditions through the whole subcontracting chain are invisible, and urban delivery pressure isn’t tracked at all. That’s exactly how the trucking debate stayed unresolved for decades; plenty of opinions, almost no measurement.
The uncomfortable truth is this: a market can look perfectly competitive and still quietly transfer its costs onto workers and cities, simply because no one is required to measure it. If Europe wants cheap, fast delivery and a fair, livable outcome, it has to build in enforcement, shared responsibility, and transparency now. Not wait ten years to discover, once again, that “we assumed it was fine” wasn’t good enough.
Walther Ploos van Amstel.
Also read: PostEurop: The EU Parcel Market Is Already Competitive. So Why Regulate It?
Also read: The EU Single Market and the Cost of Road Freight Transport
Photo: Ben Gingell Shutterstock