National Press Review, 21 February

The Labor Code debates hold under great tension between the Government, employers’ associations and trade unions have been discussed in the dailies at the beginning of this week.

‘Unity between employers’ associations and trade unions’ is the headline of a two page discussion that the Adevărul has advertised today.

Usually, at negotiations meetings such as those had by the Labor Code and the Government, should be found a balance between the right winged members represented by the employers’ association and the left winged members required by the trade unions.

According to the daily, in our country employers moved from right to left and rejected Government’s bill.

Why do employer’s associations have to accept forecasts at the expense of companies that anyway complain about the authority of employees whom they cannot fire no matter how unqualified they are?

The Adevărul tries to answer and states that those main leaders of trade unions and employers’ associations have the same purpose: they want to change neither the law of trade unions nor the law of employer’s association and as a matter of fact their privileges could diminish be it either power or influence.

According to the România Liberă, twenty two million more Romanians could have been born in fifty years. This is the number of abortions that had been carried out between 1958 and 2008, a figure that is higher than that of the recent population. Statistics reveal how disastrous the Romania’s demographic policies were in different periods of its recent history.An association president who submits to change authorities’ attitude regarding the support granted to those families that have children went to the Parliament in order to present this statistic to the lawmakers.

Was there made any decision? – the România Liberă is wondering. ‘No. They have been discussing. They have been appointing committee meetings.’

The Jurnalul Naţional carries on with its series of articles about the inland transports’ situation and today, is bringing out some information about the episode ‘CFR, the black hole in Romanian’s budget’. One of the reasons for CFR’s huge debts is electricity prices. Without any doubt, the Jurnalul Naţional outlines that CFR purchases very expensive electricity.

History is terribly complex because it is related to the status of the CFR Călători and CFR Marfă companies according to which they are not allow to choose the supplier and as a consequence electricity is very expensive; the Ministry pays for their debts and the Government wastes money.

Today, the Gândul returns to the scandal that took place at the border lines: the daily put together the official statements and after estimating, it concluded that for each smuggled cigarette confiscated other fifty cigarettes got rid of the customs control and got onto the market. The Government wastes one billion euro per year due to smuggled cigarettes.

We end with the Evenimentul Zilei that advertises for the thousandth time that along the Romanian Black Sea shore, tens of thousand of people run the risk to lose their homes because of the cliffs’ slide.

It happens in Constanţa, Eforie, Tuzla, Olimp and other districts. Instead of looking for enforcement measures, local administrations posted billboards in order to warn people that if they walked along the seashore they would run the risk to get into the sea.

Moreover, they authorize the construction of buildings on lands at risk of collapse as the Evenimentul Zilei mentioned a case under the headline ‘Investors fortify the shore… by means of blocks of flats’.

Translated by: Cristina Anamaria Maricescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University