Spontaneous protests and social issues

The public financial sector in Romania was paralyzed for more than 24 hours by a spontaneous strike of finance ministry employees, angry at not receiving, for the last two months, what is referred to as their financial incentives.

These incentives, provided for in the tax procedural code, were meant to motivate workers in the ministry of finance in gathering taxes and fighting evasion. Already cut by 25%, alongside with the rest of state salaries, the incomes of finance ministry employees dropped dramatically because of the lost incentives, which explains why their protest was so radical.

Unyielding at first, Minister Gheorghe Ialomitianu partially gave in to pressure from his employees, promising them that the incentives will be unblocked.


“We were never against these incentives, but we supported in all statements that these incentives should be granted transparently and according to job performance. Our conclusion was that we should form a committee, analyze the proposals to grant incentives, because there are a lot of signals that this system does not work within the confines of the law”, said the minister.


It should be noted that the present minister himself, as a former employee, took advantage of these incentives. The daily Gandul discovered that, while he was the head of a county financial directorate, the minister received incentives worth almost 25,000 Euros.

One of the problems of this system is precisely that the incentives are granted unfairly, on biased criteria. The protest within the Ministry of Finance was contagious.

There were manifestations of solidarity not only from finance sector workers throughout local offices in the country, but in other state sectors as well.


This is not surprising, considering that the austerity measures passed by the government to reduce the budget deficit have hit the public sector the worst. On the other hand, politicians, analysts and commentators in the press agree that reform in the public sector, which involves restructuring the administration and other public areas, cannot be delayed.

The spontaneous strike in the Ministry of Finance could be the beginning of a string of conflicts caused by the attempted reform undertaken by the present government as a result of the crisis.

It is, however, a reform which is either badly designed and badly run, as the opposition and unions say, or well thought through but not supported by good communication, as the government claims.