Over 15,000 Finance Ministry employees from all over the country went on a spontaneous strike on Thursday, dissatisfied with the measures put forth by the government to cut public spending, as such measures would affect over 22,000 people in the system, write Agerpres.
„This is a spontaneous strike that our colleagues have already adopted. It is not controllable by the unions. We wanted to start the same protest action on August 22, but in the meantime, our colleagues got even angrier and they went on a strike spontaneously. Let’s see how the government that I announced controls them. (…) From what I know now, at first hand, there are about 15,000 people nationwide at the protest,” said Vasile Marica, chairman of the National Federation of Finance Trade Unions, at the spontaneous protest started by the Ministry of Finance employees.
He added that in his recent discussions with Finance Minister Marcel Bolos he said that all the demands of the trade unionists are well-founded, and also that he will take measures, because he knows that many people are leaving the system for better pay, but ” nothing happened in a month.” „The problem is fundamentally different from the way these people are treated. The fact that the politicians blame only us for the fact that there were no tax collections, given that they make the Tax Code, they make the laws, they force us to make a certain type of legislation, we are not to blame for the matter.
The protest has nothing to do with the food vouchers, with the holiday vouchers. It is a systemic problem. For years, this system has been neither funded nor promoted; there is no career system, and now they come out to overturn what little has been built,” he added. In order to offer solutions to these problems, Marica said that first of all he has to find out what the government wants.
„First of all, we don’t understand what the government want. In order to have solutions, I need to know what they want. They want to make savings of RON 700,000 in the budget, from letting some people go and that’s it?” The unions say that more than 22,000 Finance Ministry employees will be affected by the merger and redistribution measures proposed by the government. Ministry of Finance’s SedLex trade unionists started a spontaneous protest at the ministry’s headquarters on Thursday, and they were to be joined by employees from all over the country, according to the trade union organization. The National Council of the National Federation of Finance Trade Unions convened on Thursday at the headquarters of the Ministry of Finance. The trade unionists request that pay be raised to the highest level in the uniform public pay law and a finance occupational family be introduced in the uniform public pay law with adequate pay levels.
