Talks on public sector salaries
The Romanian Government is working on a new salary draft law for the public sector.
Valentin Țigău, 19.07.2013, 13:26
Three years ago, the Government in Bucharest drew up a framework law for public sector employees that set the maximum salary at the level of 15 minimum salaries, limited the number of salary brackets to 110 and set the cap for bonuses at a maximum 30% of the base salary. Due to financial constraints, the law could not be implemented and imbalances such as a ratio of 1 to 35 between minimum and maximum salaries, over 400 salary bracket and bonuses accounting for 51% of the salary continue to stay in place.
The Government is now working on a new salary draft law in the public sector. Under this new bill, the salaries of public sector employees will include a fixed amount and also a variable percentage. The latter will depend on the employee’s professional merit and the overall budget of the employer. In Romania, the total number of public sector employees stands at 1.2 million. The new bill also stipulates that the base salary for each salary bracket will be calculated as reference value by using the 800-lei coefficient, which has been the minimum salary in Romania as of July 1st. The difference between two successive salary brackets will be kept at 2.5%.
Moreover, the level of bonuses, incentives, compensations and allowances, together with the base salary, will be calculated so as not to exceed the salary increase decided every year by special annual laws. In the meantime, government members are split over the new framework law. Some say it will be better than the previous one, while others believe it will lead to salary cuts. Former Labour Minister Sulfina Barbu, a vice president with the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, has asked for explanations regarding the manner in which the law can be implemented.
Sulfina Barbu: “The current government must explain how it will ‘downgrade’ a public employee who today holds a certain position, has a status, a certain experience and is part of a certain salary bracket. We believe it is illegal to bring a public employee from superior to inferior positions.”
Unhappy with the new payment law are also professors and teachers, who signed petitions against it and sent them to the Government. They are asking for jobs in the education systems to be unfrozen and for the payment scheme to be modified, so as the seniority incentive should not be included into the base salary. Employees in the health sector are not very happy with the bill either, as they consider it useless and have threatened to stage protests in September. There are only 40 thousand doctors in Romania at present. Of them, 600 resigned in the first quarter of this year, due to low salaries.
