The decision, Mechel representatives have explained, was also generated by the fact that the company’s target for 2012 has been reached before the deadline. Halting production, although temporarily, heralds an uncertain future for the company’s employees. Almost 1,500 employees with the plant in Targoviste will be laid off temporarily until January 10th, 2013, and will get only 80% of their salaries. The same policy will apply to the plant’s other 400 employees, after this date. The trade union with Mechel Targoviste wants the government to look for another investor. Trade union leader Gabriel Banu gives us details:

Gabriel Banu: “We are calling for the Romanian state’s involvement in the situation at Mechel, starting right now. The legislation does not help us, the Labor Code either, as, in my opinion, Law no. 62 is genocide as far as employees are concerned, so we have few legal weapons to fight with. The whole Mechel group has halted activity and put 12-15 plants out for sale, as is the case in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. They want to reduce their operations and invest in another project. “

Union leader Gabriel Banu has warned that each redundancy in the iron and steel sector leads to another 6 or 7 people laid off in related industrial fields. In the second quarter of 2012, Mechel registered losses worth 823 million dollars, after reporting net profits of 192 million dollars in the previous year. The announcement of Mechel’s temporarily halting production comes a year after another important investor, the Finnish mobile telephony giant Nokia, shut down its factory in Cluj, leaving over 2000 people unemployed.

Nokia, which had invested 60 million euros in a factory in Romania, took the decision following the company’s low productivity at world level. Another major failure in the industry sector was the privatization of the Oltchim plant, based in Ramnicu Valcea, in central Romania, one of the biggest chemical plants in Eastern Europe. The privatization of the state-owned plant, now on the verge of bankruptcy because of its huge debts, worth hundreds of millions of euros, will be resumed next year.