Working in Romania
The Romanian government has postponed until the end of the year the transition from the Electronic Register of Individual Employment Contracts
Sorin Iordan, 25.09.2025, 14:00
The Romanian government has postponed until the end of the year the transition from the Electronic Register of Individual Employment Contracts, or Revisal, to the General Register of Employees, or Reges Online. The measure comes to support employers who are having difficulties implementing the new platform. Although the final deadline was September 30, only 23% of companies in Romania managed to make the transition to the new modern electronic platform. Government spokesperson Ioana Dogioiu said that this limited percentage could have created a major risk of operational blockage and, in this case, the executive agreed to postpone the deadline. The extension was requested by representatives of the National Union of Experts in Labor Legislation, who cited several problems with the new Reges platform. They showed that there are bottlenecks in processing, long employee registration times, error messages, including the impossibility of transmission of employment contracts in due time, which would lead to the impossibility of respecting the legal deadline and hence the risk of applying serious sanctions. The union also cited the lack of an official manual for using the Reges Online platform. For example, almost three quarters of employers in Timiş County have not registered in the new register, the Territorial Labor Inspectorate announced. If the deadline had not been postponed, companies would have risked fines of between 15,000 and 20,000 lei.
The National Trade Union Bloc has launched the Union of Digital Platform Workers, the first trade union organization in Romania created specifically for those who work through applications such as Uber, Bolt, Glovo, Wolt and others. According to the cited source, the union operates at national level, with branches in all counties, and registration is open to both Romanian citizens and foreigners working in Romania. The Union of Digital Platform Workers defends members against platforms and intermediaries, provides access to social protection, namely health, pensions, unemployment, sick leave. At the same time, this trade union organization clarifies the legal status of workers, proposes fair tax regulations, ensures collective bargaining and benefits for members. The organization also supports the interests of its members in social dialogue and at the institutional level, provides legislative support and negotiation of working conditions. The National Trade Union Bloc states that, in Romania, Uber and Bolt together have over 105,000 active drivers, a figure comparable to the total number of employees of the seven largest employers in the country.
Romania has issued only a little over 57,000 work permits, out of the 3.5 million new permits granted by the European Union to non-EU citizens, and registered 643 such documents in 2024, which ranks it last in the EU, according to data from the National Confederation for Women’s Entrepreneurship. CONAF argues that Romania must change its migrant retention policies, given a population in rapid numerical decline. According to the World Health Organization’s projection, in 2050 Romania’s population will reach 16 million, with a decline of 12% in 20 years. Thus, solutions for integrating and assimilating the workforce from outside the EU are the only panacea for decades of reactive policies, the Confederation believes. This shows that Romania’s GDP is dependent on the Romanians who have left the country to work abroad and it still needs strong levers to support the accelerated aging of the workforce. President of the European Migration Alliance, Cătălin Orezeanu, warned that if Romania does not create clear paths for the integration and retention of migrants with added value potential, it will find itself assaulted by a social class that is poorly prepared professionally, with criminal potential and dangerous vulnerabilities to sovereigntist discourses. In turn, the CONAF President Cristina Chiriac recalled that over 2 million jobs have disappeared in Romania in the last 20 years.
A factory in Bihor County, northwestern Romania, is being investigated by the authorities after 295 employees were caught working without the proper legal rights. The workers were forced to work daily outside the official contract, which provided for partial employment. Local sources indicate that the factory manager had unilaterally reduced the work contracts from 8 to 6 hours, but the employees continued to work full-time, without proper pay and without the legal protections associated with a full employment. In this case, labor inspectors imposed immediate measures to remedy the situation, and the employer risks severe sanctions, including criminal charges for using undeclared labor. According to Labor Minister Florin Manole, the discovery took place during a large-scale nationwide inspection, carried out between September 8 and 12, during which over 2,000 checks were carried out. The Labor Inspectorate imposed fines of over 3.4 million lei, of which 2.5 million for undeclared work. In addition to irregularities related to contracts and salaries, the inspections also revealed serious problems regarding occupational safety, including non-compliant equipment and the lack of basic protections for dangerous machinery. (LS)
