Even if in 2010 Romania is likely to recover from the crisis, the unemployment rate will grow towards 10%, and potential pay rises could be offset by inflation, IMF representatives said last year. In early 2010, the situation is not encouraging with regard to employment. Authorities have estimated a 7.3% unemployment rate in 2010, although in keeping with a survey conducted by the Romanian Business People’s Association, business people are even more pessimistic, speaking about an 8% unemployment rate. Therefore, together with our guests today, we will tackle the issue of unemployment as a long term effect of the crisis. Dumitru Costin, president of the National Trade Union Bloc, says unemployment is still on the rise, because the measures taken by the state are passive, instead of active, and meant to provide social protection, rather than jobs.
“The situation will very likely become extremely complicated. Since people have no alternatives, several types of behaviour appear. On the one hand, there is the addiction to social protection measures, and for that reason some people ‘forget’ what is it like to work, they lose their professional skills. Others turn more and more edgy and, under the constant threat of unemployment, they can no longer work effectively. Therefore, the very effectiveness of the company or of the public institution they work for is affected. Also, the migration process continues. This is quite obvious in the latest European Commission statistics, including labour market forecasts. As for the Romanian labour market, the situation looks rather catastrophic for the year 2050, with the highest rate of pensioners/employees dependence in Europe. That means that less and less workers stay here, the retirement age increases, and so does the number of pensioners. That's why we have problems with the public pensions system."
According to the unionists' representative, the situation in the budget sector looks like this: the new salary law is incoherent and with serious flaws, public management is poor, people prefer to stay in this sector, there are many of them, working on small wages, therefore the work quality drops. On the other hand, in the private sector the unemployment rate is higher, as decisions to lay off groups or individuals are more easily made. Still, in this sector too the situation seems to be improving. Iuliana Badea, Executive Manager of Lugera&Makler recruiting company, told us:
"As compared to the same period last year, the situation is good, because starting September - October 2009 the trend has been positive, but the difference is not that big. What is certain is that companies have started to employ personnel, for both executive and middle management positions. I couldn’t say for certain that we’ve come out of the crisis, though we can see some economic recovery through these recruiting projects which have already commenced. I believe there will not be many redundancies, though the employment process will not be fast or extensive enough to include all the people made redundant in 2009.”
The young and inexperienced as well as aged people are among the most vulnerable categories to this phenomenon. Here is Dumitru Costin again:
“Those who enter the labor market in Romania come directly out of schools, with only theoretical knowledge, and that reduces their chance of finding a job. This is a glitch of the Romanian education system. In recent years Romania has abandoned technical education, stopped training people in this field and this is something that should worry the movers and shakers in this country. Most of the youngsters, after graduating from high schools go to universities, get a master’s degree and so on; so it’s become very difficult nowadays to find skilled welders, for instance, painters, tinmen or carpenters…The second high risk category is that of workers above 45 years, as employers, mainly those in the private sector, have little interest in hiring these people. They prefer younger workers, abler to better cope with difficult working conditions. The second reason is that workers over 45 are very unlikely to join retraining programmes. They prefer to stick to the trade they have practiced for the past 10, 15 or even 25 years.”
Iuliana Badea also believes it is far more difficult now for young people to find a decent job.
“While in the past there were 2-3 people competing for a job, today we probably have 10 people applying for the same job. Those who worked during their student years or who got involved in various projects for a specific period of time or had part-time jobs stand better chances to find a job. It’s a little bit complicated for people over 50 years, since they have a smaller number of training courses to choose from.“
As concerns employers’ attitude towards people over 50 years of age, Iuliana Badea believes this is a matter which depends on the field of activity. There are companies which still need highly-trained individuals, with expertise in the field.
BNS president Dumitru Costin suggests several measures for curbing unemployment, such as to further develop technical education, to increase the number of institutions in the labour market, mainly private ones, able to offer alternatives in terms of re-training measures tailored to the market demand, large-scale public investment programmes, as well as the modernisation of Romania’s rural environment.
According to Iuliana Badea, in spite of the difficulties generated by the high unemployment rates, there are sectors of the economy which have seen increasing demand in labor force. These areas include: sales, book-keeping, entry-level positions in the financial-banking system, engineers, IT experts. At the opposite pole, with the lowest number of jobs on offer, there are the real estate and building projects.
|
2010-09-06
Print
