Fire them all!

If it wasn"t for the IMF coming over to visit on April 27th, to decide whether they"re going to give us in June, the fifth installment of the loan (850 million Euros), then president Traian Băsescu would stop making a fuss on B1 TV that the Government hasn"t laid off enough public sector workers and he wouldn"t have had to ask the Boc cabinet to come over to the Cotroceni palace today to show him where the layoffs are buried in all those statistics. Because he can"t find them.

In the beginning of the year, the Minister of Finance Sebastian Vlădescu had said that a hundred thousand public sector workers would need to be laid off.

Today, almost for months later, the number of employees in the civil sector workers doesn"t seem to have shrunk significantly (except perhaps for the 10,000 railway sector workers from the Romanian Railway Company, which is now hiring again"), nor did spending, in spite of some public institutions being merged.

Lucian Croitoru, advisor to the governor of the NBR, appointed PM during the political crisis which occurred around the elections, at the end of last year, repeated the statement made by Vlădescu on Sunday while he was on TV, and he confirmed that 100,000 employees would have to be let go.

It"s a catastrophe.

Who do we let go?

Mom or dad?

Who do you love more?

Once we get to this painful question (it kind of resembles "Sophie"s choice" with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline), I must say that we are actually taking the wrong approach.

When he was appointed Minister of Finance, Vlădescu had no study on hand that would state how many public sector workers are extraneous. He hadn"t had the time to make the study. At best, he managed to make a simple calculation, - how many public sector workers should be fired to shave a certain amount off public spending.

The IMF is doing it the same way.

Croitoru is doing it the same way.

In fact, Romania holds one of the lowest spots in Europe in terms of the number of public sector employees per thousand citizens, even though, in the last five years the number of social sector workers has roughly doubled compared to 2004, reaching 1.4 - 1.6 million (roughly being the key word here, they"ve been 1.72 million at one time).

We have "roughly" 80 public sector workers per thousand citizens, while Hungary and Bulgaria have 82 per thousand, Poland has 95, Slovenia 117, Sweden has 138, and Norway has 182 (there aren"t any left in Iceland, they ran away to avoid taking responsibility for their country"s default).

Ce este, însă, foarte rău la noi, ţine de productivitatea bugetarilor din sectorul What"s bad about the public utilities, transportation and production sector - is the fact that when you come in contact with these people you curse the day you were born, even though they are paid like kings (of course, people in the administration have the effect of deepening the depression of the taxpayers).

Laying off the people that work in public production, transportation and services would not lead to their improvement. It"s up to the management to do that, first and foremost, and laying off people comes second.

Well, the IMF isn"t going to offer any management advice.

Vlădescu doesn"t seem willing to do so either.

Croitoru doesn"t have any.

An example: what was so difficult for the state to exploit the gold deposits in Roşia Montană?

Over there, the money lies in the ground, literally.

All you have to do is dig it out.

For this, the government needs technology. It wouldn"t have even had to take it out from the budget to buy the equipment needed for the exploitation, it could have bought them on credit ...

But what can you do...

How do you move teachers in the urban areas (where there are too many of them) to the rural areas, where there aren"t enough?

Last year, the government allowed teachers in rural areas to move to cities, by eliminating the restrictions to move around at will (fair enough), but in doing so left countryside areas without their so-called bright minds.

What is there to be done about the shortage of policemen in the rural area? Set up posses like in the Wild West?

How do you get doctors to move to any rural areas, to have them take over the 2000-2500 peasants that belong to a doctor? "Perhaps we should pay for their commute?" "- No, what are you, nuts?! That would increase public spending!"

Elena Udrea"s program of building 25,000 homes in rural areas for doctors, teachers and policemen is the most reasonable thing to do, but of course, it needs to be complemented by others that would entice public sector workers to move to those areas.

But gosh!, that program would increase public sector spending. And those civil servants don"t even deserve it. Doctor"s will make you sicker if you don"t give them their due, teachers are a bunch of rednecks and they always want to get their due, policemen will just as soon arrest you if you don"t give them their due, and priests will deny you a decent funeral if they don"t get their due.

Corruption all the way, my man!

All the way to the bone.

This is the one thing that the IMF, Băsescu, Vlădescu, or Croitoru haven"t taken into account.

And even though he is against these layoffs, PM Emil Boc hasn"t taken it into account either.

Boc found a rebuttal: if he cuts wages and bonuses, then the civil servants sue the state and win it all back in court, plus court charges; so firing them would actually increase the budget deficit.

Boc doesn"t have the serious rebuttal of a manager - "Hey wait, I will make the Romanian Railways, the subway company, Romgaz, Electrica and all the others profitable, and I will get rid of incompetent teachers and greedy doctors and so on..."

If he were to say that, who would believe him anyway?!

They should all be fired.

If governing is difficult, and the government won"t quit, then, logically enough, public sector workers need to go.

Let them all go!