Romania Amends Wages Law.

Bucharest; May 2026: Romania’s interim minister for labour, Dragos Pislaru yesterday late evening (IST) has presented the Reforms pertinent to the Wages Law. Pislaru said that, “we are in the 12th hour to see how we can carry out this very important reform and it is a good moment for Romania, because we have a political agreement mediated by the Presidential Administration”.

According to the minister, the parties agreed on the central idea that wages do not decrease and that we need a unitary implementation, so that they will adopt the entire law at once and in a unitary way. He also announced that discussions with occupational families and unions will begin today (Tuesday – 26th).

“The salary reform in the budgetary sector in Romania is a long-awaited project. We are in May and I believe we are in the 12th hour to see, indeed, how we can carry out this very important reform. We are in a good moment for Romania, in a moment in which we have a political agreement mediated by the Presidential Administration, precisely to ensure that this law has a chance of being passed”.

Dragoş Pîslaru presented the steps related to the reform, showing that two essential things are needed. “We need to see what we can afford and the second thing, I told you that this political agreement on principles is needed. Today we are trying to fix, if we can also look at the principles, a salary legislation that was adopted in 2017, law 153, which in essence was not necessarily bad, as a law”.

According to the interim Minister of Labor, the political parties have agreed on the maximum ceiling that we can afford. “From 166 billion lei, what we currently have, we cannot exceed 174 billion lei next year, so 8 billion lei to be the budget for this reform,” he said.

Dragoş Pîslaru also stated that the parties agreed on the central idea that salaries will not decrease, that no income will decrease and that we need a unitary implementation, so that they will adopt the entire law at once and in a unitary manner, with no exceptions or things to be adopted separately by occupational families.

He also said that the first clear thing for any wage legislation is this principle, work of equal value, equal pay. “You can’t have a salary system in which you have positions that have the same work content and are remunerated differently. What happened in recent years, after the adoption of Law 153, is that some extra money was given to certain occupational families, others were left behind and the differences remained major for the same type of positions”, explained the interim Minister of Labour.

Dragoş Pîslaru also stated that the second essential thing is related to predictability and sustainability.

“There must be a connection between several things, on the one hand, how much you can afford, what is the medium-term commitment you have, related to the budget deficit and you know that Romania has this commitment to get back to 3% by 2030, then we have the 2027 budget deficit target, which must be respected and in general let’s see how we correlate this increase in the salary envelope in a way that keeps up with productivity in the private sector. The third thing that is essential for a relatively old public administration system, in terms of age, over 40 years, is the idea of ​​how you support entry-level positions in the public administration, beginners and how you motivate them and for this, obviously you need to look at salaries”, said Pîslaru.

The minister also pointed out that another element that is crucial is that of performance and responsibility. “We know very well that this has been discussed for a long time. In Law 153, taken from what I had worked on at the Ministry of Labor with the team, the idea of ​​bonuses and performance incentives was taken over, but which then derailed with each occupational family, with their own interpretations”.

Pîslaru added that it is also about a clearer and more predictable unitary system, because “we are still in a situation where certain salary elements derive from somewhere in history and that VRS still appears as a reference value and at the same time something completely harmful appears, namely litigation or assimilations or extensions which, through the little train ordinance, at the end of each year, are pushed another year further. So you need to have the prerogative of the Government, the executive, to adopt a unitary budgetary payroll system”, said Pîslaru.

According to him, there was a political decision in 2017 that he did not agree with as a representative of the Government at the time, but it was decided and Law 153 enshrined this, namely that the local administration left the grid, the grid for the local administration was abolished, with salaries being capped at the salaries of the deputy mayor or vice president of the City Council, and now this grid is being restored.

“Tomorrow we start the first meetings with everyone from occupational families and everyone from unions, for information on the aspects of these laws, after which on Wednesday we start consultations with occupational families and unions related to various profiles or parts of the administration”, Pislaru also said. He mentioned that this process will be done very fairly and transparently.

“We will gather the amendments that we will have in the consultations, we will transmit to Parliament, to the political parties that concluded the political agreement, the initial form, the form of the amendments that emerged from the consultations, with obviously a proposal from our specialists from the Ministry of Labor and the World Bank specialists, with partial or full adoption or takeover, after which the project will be taken over as a legislative project, an initiative by the political leaders in Parliament and we hope that it will lead to adoption as quickly as possible”, said Pîslaru.

Team Maverick.