Local government employees oppose the abolition of vacancies

Employees from the local public administration and social assistance protested, yesterday, in front of the Government headquarters, dissatisfied with the measures to reorganize the public system announced, a month ago, by Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and Minister of Finance Marcel Boloş, and who are caught in an emergency ordinance project that is in decisional transparency and to be adopted by the Executive in one of the meetings that will take place next week.

The more than 2,000 protesters showed that at the moment there are more than 12,000 vacancies in the Social Assistance system, which have not been filled because of the unattractive salaries offered and because of the fault of the Government, which has blocked employment through emergency ordinances in recent years, even if the checks in the centers managed by this system, have identified the hiring of staff as an urgent measure.

At the same time, the Government proposes massive redundancies and the abolition of some institutions citing the fact that they have less than 50 employees, a measure that would bring uncertainty about the fate of thousands of employees in the local administration, but also uncertainty among citizens about the quality of the new reorganized public services , according to the representatives of the National Union of Public Administration Employees in Municipalities and Cities (SCOR).

"We are not slaves on the plantation; we are the local public administration. The social dialogue should be conducted in a civilized manner, in the Victoria Palace, with the representatives of the associative structures of the local public administration and with the representatives of the trade unions. For a month we have been asking to have this dialogue, ever since we began to understand, from sources in the press, that there will be an emergency ordinance that the Government does not officially assume, but the ministers appear on television and tell us they heroically tell how they will cut off heads with this ordinance. We want to convey to them that there is a need for dialogue, to understand how the problems really lie at the root. For four years, since 2019, the local administration has been kept with frozen salaries. In a commune town hall, the salaries are not the ones you see on TV next to Nicuşor Dan. The salaries of all employees in a town hall cannot exceed the allowance of the deputy mayor, which, in a commune, is not 20,000 lei as in Bucharest, but in more than half of the communes it is lower, in net value, than the minimum wage of an unskilled worker in constructions. Therefore, no employee from a commune town hall, from those with less than 3000 inhabitants, does not rise to the level of minimum wage in construction. In these austerity conditions that we have been enduring for 4 years, half of the staff of the town halls of the communes in the country have left and we have a terrible hemorrhage of staff", said Dan Cârlan, the president of the SCOR National Trade Union, of the employees of the town halls of the communes and cities in Romania .

The representative of the employees in the local public administration claims that, if the Government takes the measure of canceling the vacant positions, the activity of the communes will be completely paralyzed.

"There are still a lot of vacancies that we, those who are still active, have to fill, because in a town hall with 8 or 10 positions, each employee does two or three different activities so that we can provide services at a reasonable level to our fellow citizens. We are waiting for the new wage law which is said to be a fair one, which will correct this huge discrepancy between the village and the city, with the hope that after that we too will be able to become attractive again for filling vacancies, and if we have the right by law for 10 posts in a town hall, let's have 10 people occupying them, not 7, 6 or 5. But the Government comes now and says that all vacant posts will be abolished. This measure is the cross placed on the grave of the local public administration. The government says it will have a deficit of 135 billion lei at the end of the year, if the measures it wants to impose are not adopted. All central, county and local public administrations total 85 billion lei in the budget. We're all going home if we're the problem. But there remains a deficit behind us of 50 billion lei, which can no longer be explained by our salaries. If the entire public administration were to disappear, there would still be a deficit of 50 billion lei, i.e. 10 billion euros. Where is that hole? In our salaries? I guarantee you don't. Austerity measures must be taken where the damage is greatest, where the real hole in the budget is. And when they want to influence the local public administration to talk to us, let's explain to them that we worked for a year to establish a service for population records, through which we can issue an identity card to our fellow citizens in the village, so that they don't leave again for this purpose at the county seat municipality. At this service, as a ruleit is mandatory to have three positions. If a post is now vacant and the Government cancels it, all that service is abolished. This is what local public administration is all about," said Dan Cârlan, president of SCOR.

The SCOR National Trade Union requests the Government's willingness to engage in dialogue with the social partners, in order to identify the best solutions for the purpose of amending the current emergency ordinance project aimed at economic-financial discipline in the budgetary field.