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he big companies will have to understand that Romanians are no longer slaves to anyone and that they have to work on decent salaries, and the fiscal facilities provided by the Romanian state will allow them to increase the incomes of their employees, the minister of Labour and Social Justice, Lia Olguta Vasilescu stated on Wednesday evening at Antena 3 private TV broadcaster.
"We want to provide the business community with as many fiscal facilities as possible, to have a friendly business environment, maybe better than everywhere in the European Union in terms of taxation, but at the same time, the money that does not get back to the state, for example from the Value added tax which lowered from 24 pct to 19 pct, the special constructions tax which is no longer collected, from the excise taxes that have decreased at the beginning of the year, from the corporate income tax, the tax on dividends, which has decreased from 16 pct to 5 pct and to zero starting with next year, so given that we provide the business environment with all these facilities, we expect the money to go not only to their profit, in their pockets but also to go to the investment part, to the payment side so as to bring as many Romanians as possible in the middle class," said Lia Olguta Vasilescu.
Asked if the uniform pay law would not create a large pay gap between the state and the private system, the Minister of Labor said that the idea is not "to abandon the private sector", but instead, the private environment to be forced somehow to increase employee revenue.
"In general, 98 pct of the State employees have a higher education diploma. It is logical, that in this respect at least, the wage system should be higher. However, the idea is not to abandon those in the private sector, who should remain with some very low salaries. On the contrary, we somehow force the private business milieu so that they increase as well their employees' incomes and for that we carry out all sorts of incentive schemes for businesspersons (...) When we change the tax system next year you will see that the net salary of the private employee increases by 17 pct, even if the employer does not pay another leu as compared to what he is paying right now," underscored Lia Olguta Vasilescu.
On the other hand, she mentioned that the bad news for employers is that it will not be possible anymore to work on the black market, and a special division will be created within the Labour Inspectorate to this purpose.
"We are reorganising the Labor Inspectorate and we will create a special division for the black market labour. The state loses a great deal of money because of that, but worse than anything is that those people are destroyed for life, because not having their medical insurance covered, they can't benefit from medical services, pension contributions, they cannot take their pension when they retire (... ), they cannot apply for unemployment status to get their unemployment benefit. We will be merciless in this respect," the Labour Minister said.
