According to the previously published draft legislation, public sector employees will receive a 5 percent wage increase as of January 1, but they will not receive a bonus in 2024, and overtime pay – with the exception of the armed forces – will not be paid, but rather . They will be compensated with vacation days, and wage supplements will be frozen at the December 2023 level. The decree extends a previously introduced headcount freeze and significantly reduces support for the most popular environmental protection programs: It halves the amount of support provided in the “Junk Car Program,” which It aims to renew the polluting car fleet, and in the solar panel program.
According to the regulation
From January 1, 2024, pensions will be increased by 13.8 percent – at 2022 average inflation.
The project stipulated an increase in teachers’ wages by 20 percent by 2024, including 13 percent as of January 1 and 7 percent as of June 1. However, these provisions were deleted from the text of the decree approved on Thursday before the government meeting, with a promise to approve separate legislation apart from them.
According to the statement issued after the government meeting, which lasted until the night, the Council of Ministers accepted the emergency decree, and the government press office did not indicate whether other amendments had been made to the published draft.
Unions of health and law enforcement employees, as well as other sectors, are unhappy with a 5 percent wage increase that does not even cover the inflation loss, and threaten further budget cuts and strikes. The health care union Sanitas described the wage negotiations with the Prime Minister as a failure and announced that it would begin collecting signatures from Monday in order to declare a national labor struggle.
The representative of the police services and prison guards stated that they would leave the prisoners unguarded in protest at Christmas and New Year.
The Statisticians Syndicate announced that workers in the regional offices of the Statistical Office will take turns protesting by stopping work for half an hour against the permanent postponement of fulfilling promises of a wage increase.
The Romanian government has prepared the state budget for next year with an emergency decree aimed at reducing budget expenditures. The draft budget was also finalized by the Bucharest government at its meeting on Thursday.
In October, the government actually implemented a deficit reduction package, which primarily attempted to reduce the budget deficit through tax measures – imposing special taxes on large companies and banks, increasing the tax burden on small entrepreneurs, and narrowing sectoral tax incentives. Later, he tried, by another decree, to prevent the usual expenditure at the end of the year by institutions operating from public funds.
In 2023, Romania wanted to reduce the budget deficit in relation to GDP to 4.4 percent from 5.68 percent last year, according to the target set in the budget law. But according to data published by the Ministry of Finance on Wednesday, despite the austerity measures implemented in the fall, the deficit is expected to approach 6 percent of the gross domestic product.
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