Private companies have laid off 200,000 people since September last year because of the crisis, but the state let only 2,300 public sector employees go, which means almost 100 times fewer redundancies, according to statistics of the National Employment Agency (ANOFM) obtained by Ziarul Financiar.
Therefore, the private sector bears the brunt - almost 99% of the crisis, while the public sector, now eating into the financial resources, remains untouched. Moreover, in addition to layoffs, the private sector also operated pay cuts.
"The restructuring of the state sector has yet to happen because there are funding sources, whereas private companies have had no choice but to move on to personnel restructuring after cutting other costs. On the other hand, the state started to take out international loans, found all kinds of solutions through inside arrangements, added a tax here or there, cut back on other expenses and has kept its employees," explains Adrian Izvoranu, general manager of the Alliance of Business Owners Confederations in Romania (ACPR). The Boc Government has been trying to cut salaries of the state-employed workforce for eight months, since taking office, but has been unsuccessful. Even Prime Minister Emil Boc has recently voiced surprise at the fact that someone employed as a driver in a government agency received a net salary of 1,000 euros.
Now a cut in the number of state employees is being discussed, but the Government does not even have statistics on the number of its agencies. President Traian Basescu originally talked about cutting the overall number of public jobs by 20%, which would have amounted to 280,000 unemployed generated by the public sector, but yesterday afternoon he recanted, proposing 10,000-15,000 job cuts in the public sector, which would affect around 1% of employees. Considering an average net salary of 350 euros, salary costs entailed by the 1.4 million public sector employees amount to 11 billion euros. A 20% cut in public sector jobs would have meant 2.2 billion-euro savings, i.e. 1.8% of the GDP, while Basescu’s latest proposal brings only 110 million euros in savings, i.e. 0.09% of the GDP, completely insignificant when it comes to the state’s costs.
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