The effect of the government's policy of keeping the national minimum wage low will be a rise in the workers' social unrest, so that disruptions in sectors such as trade, railways or machine building are highly likely next year, president of the "Cartel ALFA" National Trade Union Confederation (CNS) Bogdan Hossu said on Tuesday.
Several dozen members of the trade union organization picketed today the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, demanding the government to increase the minimum gross wage to 2,400 lei. The Executive announced on Monday its decision to increase the minimum gross wage from 2,230 lei to 2,300 lei and that it will regulate this decision on Wednesday.
"We will continue the fight, because we are told that the pay must depend on productivity, and according to Eurostat, our productivity is 66 percent of the European average hourly productivity, but our hourly wage in euros is 35 percent of the EU average minimum hourly wage, which only shows that the workers are being stolen, money is stolen from their pockets, benefiting the capital, and anyway the distribution of economic growth between capital and the worker is the opposite to the European standard, to what is customary in the normal European structures. The economic growth distribution is 52 percent to the capital and only 40-41 percent to the worker, although in the European system it's the other way round," mentioned Bogdan Hossu.
"The current government disregarded the legislation in force, which defines a minimum basket as an instrument for calculating the national minimum wage, as well as the future European legislation, and I am referring here to the directive on the European minimum wage, which provides for a ratio which in Romania is obviously not as it should be for a good distribution in the system. (...) The fact that no steps are taken for settling the issue of collective bargaining agreements only shows that the vast majority of workers - and it's over 1.4 million of them - will further collect the national minimum wage and this will actually be a fiscal fraud the government encourages through its policies," concluded Bogdan Hossu.
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