Salary Raise for State Employees
Romanian employees with low salaries might benefit from a 20% salary raise as of August this year.
Roxana Vasile, 07.04.2016, 13:39
The average net salary in Romania stood at 2,000 lei in February, data issued by the National Statistics Institute show. This is the equivalent of some 450 Euros, which is indecently low as compared to average salaries in the other EU countries, especially in the West.
It is a well-known fact that the only country outranking Romania when it comes to low salaries is Bulgaria. The lowest salaries are earned by employees in the hotel-restaurant sector, who make approximately 1,150 lei a month. At the opposite pole, with 5,100 lei there stand the employees in the IT sector.
As for the larger categories of state employees, the highest average salaries were recorded in administration and public order, and the lowest in education and health-care. If abroad the average net salary stands somewhere around the national average, which is 2,000 lei, in education it is lower, namely 1,880 lei.
According to the spokesman for the current technocrat Government in Bucharest, Dan Suciu, state employees who have low salaries might benefit from a 20% raise as of August this year, under a draft ordinance debated in a government session on Wednesday. The document is to be passed next week. Dan Suciu has stressed that this is as much as the Government can afford this year.
Dan Suciu: “Changes in the lower half of the salary grid will be made under this ordinance, because there are many malfunctions in that area. The raise could reach 20%, for social workers for instance. For other categories, the salary raise will be lower, and many of them will only get a 1% increase. But we do have increases for all categories. On average, the raise will stand at approximately 5%. Let’s not forget, though, that this comes after an overall increase in the sector of 10%, and as of May 1st we will be speaking about a new minimum wage at national level.”
The President of the ‘Cartel Alfa’ Trade Union Confederation, Bogdan Hossu, believes, however, that the measure will increase the number of salary categories that overlap, which will in turn cause new problems.
Bogdan Hossu: “The minimum wage will go up to 1,250 lei as of May 1st, which means that the 26 categories that overlap today will become 30. This will obviously generate malfunctions in the system and anyway, according to the legislation in force, the Government, budget authorizing officers in particular, will have to operate the raise for state employees, who will benefit from the new minimum salary.”
The financial impact of this 20% raise will translate into 500 million lei from the state budget this year, and another 1.5 billion lei next year. Some of the money needed for this increase will come from the dividends that state-owned companies remit to the state budget.
