210,000 public sector employees go home weekly

The government has to accomplish a sweeping reform of the state apparatus, so the 1.4 million public sector employees will see their wages cut by approximately 20% in the last three months of the year. The employees will go on an unpaid holiday of two weeks, meaning that 15% of them, that is 210,000 people, will stay at home in turns for two weeks by yearend. Another possibility is for working hours to be reduced at 6 hours daily. At any rate, their wages will be cut by 20% each month starting September. A day after the IMF presented the conclusions of the first assessment of the stand-by agreement with Romania, Finance minister Gheorghe Pogea admitted in a press conference that the state apparatus was “overweight”. The IMF accepted a 3% deficit raise, to 7.3% of GDP, but asked the authorities to cut expenses by 0.8% of GDP this year, namely 1bn euros.