EXCLUSIVE Wages and bonuses increases for civil servants. Higher incomes for thousands of civil servants in state agriculture / Extra pay for neuropsychic overstrain for officials at the National Integrity Agency (ANI)

The Chamber of Deputies has scheduled for its next plenary session a law that would increase the salaries of several thousand public employees in the agricultural sector. These include employees at the Gheorghe Ionescu-Sișești Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences, the Agricultural Payments and Intervention Agency and the Rural Investment Financing Agency.

Another income increase was voted in Parliament on Tuesday. Employees of the National Integrity Agency (ANI) will receive a bonus for risk and neuropsychic overstrain after the Chamber of Deputies voted, as the decision-making chamber, a bill to this effect.

The wage increases are taking place against a backdrop of galloping inflation and a lack of any budgetary reform. What’s more, according to an Economedia analysis, the number of state employees has continued to rise over the past year and is now at its highest level in 12 years. And this at a time when, according to the latest census, Romania’s population has shrunk by more than a million over the past decade.

The bill had already passed the Senate plenary in December 2022, but at that time it only provided for increased salaries for employees of the Agricultural Payments and Intervention Agency (APIA). On Monday 13 March, however, deputies on the Agriculture Committee adopted an admission report adding two institutions whose employees will receive increased salaries: The Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences and the Agency for Rural Investment Financing (AFIR).

How will wages increase? By simply changing the classification from territorial civil service to state civil service, which would lead to an increase in earnings of around 10-15%.

The draft law also provides for the application to all employees of these state institutions of bonuses for dangerous and harmful working conditions.

USR MEP Alin Apostol criticises the intention of the PSD-PNL-UDMR coalition to increase salaries for the three categories of budget workers: „I find this bill absolutely unfair, not to say very harsh words, as long as there are over 1.2 million minimum wage contracts in Romania. It is disgusting. The PSD and the PNL are proposing wage increases for a few thousand people. Let’s not be surprised when honest people don’t come to vote and abandon this administrative mafia”.

Translated