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| THE WEEK IN REVIEW 10-16/11/2008 |
| (2008-11-14) |
| Last updated: 2008-11-17 17:19 EET |
The several week long conflict between education trade unions and the government has taken an unexpected turn. Teachers have decided to postpone the start of a an all-out strike planned for the 18th of November for after the parliamentary elections, so as not to give their protest a political connotation. The conflict started when the government passed an emergency ordinance, delaying for a few months a 50% salary increase for teachers approved by Parliament. The controversial ordinance became the subject of heated debates in Parliament, with the Liberal Democrats even filing a no-confidence motion which never got to be discussed because of the lack of quorum. The government replaced it with a new ordinance providing for a gradual increase in teachers' salaries by 28% starting on March 1st 2009. Public servants' unions also gave up plans to hold an all-out strike, while health care employees signed an agreement with the health minister Eugen Nicolaescu, under which their salaries will be increased in 2009 by an average of 10% and will include other incentives.
Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu on Tuesday invited political parties, trade unions and employers' associations for talks with a view to signing an agreement on the new law regulating salaries of state employees. In Tariceanu's opinion, the new law is well-grounded and complies with European Union regulations. Under the new law, the ratio between the minimum wage and the maximum wage is 1 to 15, instead of 1 to 29, as it is now. The law also aims to adjust salaries to the importance and responsibility of the job and the complexity of studies, and will include certain benefits to the basic salary to create a new hierarchy of money distribution. Opposition parties have turned down the Prime Minister's invitation, accusing him of tolerating a disproportionate growth of salaries for managers of state-owned company and then trying, in what they describe as a populist move, to increase low salaries while passing the whole responsibility on to the future cabinet. Only one major trade union federation signed the agreement with the government, while the others say they are waiting to negotiate with the future government resulting from the elections on the 30th of November.
In the last few months, several international financial institutions and rating agencies have issued negative forecasts for Romania's economic future, despite this country's record breaking economic growth rates in recent years. All these institutions believe Romania does not have the capacity to prevent a severe crisis because of its big foreign deficit, high inflation rate and the vulnerable exchange rate of the national currency. Romania's president Traian Basescu said Romania does not need to borrow money from international financial organisations, since its current hard currency reserve of 27 billion euros is perhaps the biggest in the country's post-war history. Nevertheless, signals coming from the foreign and domestic markets made Prime Minister Tariceanu come up with an anti-crisis plan to prevent the effects of the world recession from affecting Romania. His plan implies the disbursement of 10 billion euros from the state budget over the next four years to encourage the creation of new jobs, reduce taxes and fees, support small and medium sized companies, agriculture and the home building industry.
Until not long ago, Romania was complaining of a shortage of labour. Today, the world financial and economic crisis has changed that dramatically. Local employment agencies receive more and more applications for unemployment benefits and trade unions are sounding the alarm. Their figures are, however, in stark contrast with official ones. According to the Labour Ministry, the total number of the unemployed will reach 30,000 in March 2009, while trade unions speak about 1 million people losing their jobs in one year. Half of them are Romanians returning from Spain and Italy, countries which are already affected by the world crisis. In Romania, you hear about more and more companies laying off people or making technical redundancies. The first sectors to face such problems are the textiles industry, the building sector, the iron and steel industry and the chemical industry.
The French artist Jean Michel Jarre, a pioneer of electronic music, who has sold over 80 million albums in his career, gave a concert in Bucharest on Monday. The event was part of his indoor tour which started this spring in Paris and has so far taken him to Europe's biggest cities. Jean Michel Jarre has three times made it to the Book of Records for the large number of people coming to his concerts. Even though the public was not that numerous in Bucharest, his fans were very enthusiastic, which made the artist promise to return to Romania next year.
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2025-04-04
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