Finance Ministry employees take to the streets

Several hundred Finance Ministry employees in Bucharest, Bacău, Bihor, Dâmbovița, Galați, Giurgiu, Pitești, Mureș, Prahova, Satu Mare, Hunedoara, Cluj, Buzău, Constanța, Alba, and Timiș counties suspended their activity yesterday, unhappy with the elimination of incentives since new minister Gheorghe Ialomițianu took over. Salaries in the Finance Ministry have always been higher than in other institutions, and were doubled or even tripled thanks to incentives, with their elimination leading to cuts of more than 25% – the percentage by which the incomes of the other state-paid workers were cut.

This is the second big protest of employees in a single ministry, after the police workers’ strike, which prompted the resignation of Interior Minister Vasile Blaga.

The fact that the incentives granted to Finance Ministry employees had been kept was one of the reasons cited by President Traian Băsescu last month when he dismissed former minister Sebastian Vlădescu.

The Finance Ministry yesterday issued a release saying that “salaries of employees in the Ministry of Public Finance rank last in the budget system,” without specifying how it had come to this. According to data from the National Statistics Institute, the Finance Ministry is the only public institution whose fund dedicated to incentives was higher than the salary fund last year. (187 million-euro salaries and 212 million-euro incentive fund).