Two months after the coming into force of the law imposing a 25% cut to salaries of state employees, the Statistics Institute reveals that incomes of public administration personnel declined by less than 14%. Moreover, in August, salaries of such workers rose by 1.2% against July, the same percentage by which the average net salary in the overall economy fell.
At the same time, in the healthcare system and the education
system, which also include private sector employees (which should
not have seen salary declines for these two months), the reduction
of the average salary amounted to 20% and 27.3% respectively.
The granting of holiday bonuses and the fact that there are public
sector employees with incomes close to the minimum salary in the
economy (600 RON in gross amount) – for which the 25% cut was not
applicable – are the main reasons for which the salaries of state
employees are not reflected in the statistics, these are the
explanations given by the Statistics Institute. Although the
progression of personnel spending, as recorded with the Finance
Ministry, reveals a decline of over 25% in personnel spending
against the similar period of last year, some of the public
institutions have quite clearly left their salary budgets
untouched.