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Not a single wage in Healthcare and Education will decrease after the new public payroll legislation is worked out, Minister of Labor and Social Protection Raluca Turcan declared on Tuesday on broadcaster Digi 24.
"The Memorandum (that sets forth the principles for the revision of the wages of public sector employees) provides for a single basic wage depending on which all the bonuses will be included in the basic wage of each employee, those bonuses that all employees receive. (...) If everybody collects those bonuses, why not include them in the basic wage, readjust the basic wage in the pay grid, and if a bonus should be offered, then let that be for exceptional working conditions or for incentivisation. To answer briefly and firmly: there will be no wage decrease in the Health sector. Period. There will be no wage decrease in either Healthcare or Education, because we are talking about bonuses that are granted for certain specialties, like in Healthcare, or for certain activities, and then the respective professions will be readjusted in the wage grid," Turcan said.
The Labor Minister mentioned that there are currently huge imbalances in the public payroll.
"It's a simple method that has been previously applied in 2010 and 2011 and has yielded results, only that guess what parliamentary majority came next and created a host of exceptions, and the single pay law ended up being deeply inconsistent. There is obviously a misinformation tendency in the public space, especially from the part of certain political actors who feel somewhat guilty because after so much time spent at rule, the public pay system is fraught with gross inequities, with huge imbalances that cost the public coffer every year, because any inequity in the public payroll system has led to lawsuits, wage claims, retroactive payments," Turcan said.
The memorandum setting out the principles that will underpin the revision and elaboration of the legal framework for the remuneration of public sector employees was adopted at Thursday's government meeting, and the ministries have 30 days to submit proposals on the public system wage policy.
