Romania’s leaders sold off their citizens’ rights and kept their wages at rock-bottom to satisfy foreign investor lobbyists and billion-Euro lenders from the EU and IMF, argue labour experts and unions

Romania was used as a ‘guinea pig’ by foreign investors with the support of lenders, as a test case in the EU to weaken workers’ rights to bargain for higher salaries, details academic research









Romania is a country viewed as an economic miracle in the European Union.

Its unemployment hovers around five per cent, its growth rate is an EU best of over five per cent, and its GDP grows five per cent each year.

The statistics are clear: the country is booming.

But a closer look inside Romania reveals a shocking reality - crippling poverty, widespread labour exploitation, low purchasing power and a mass emigration by working-age citizens from all its regions .

How has the country become an economist’s dream and a worker’s nightmare?

A key reason is that Romania is a country of a cheap and flexible labour force, where most workers are defenceless in the face of their employers, and the minimum wage is a reference salary for millions.

With one in three Romanians trapped in a contract on the lowest possible salary, this country contains a dumping ground of cheap and desperate labour within the EU.

How did this happen?

Forced to liberalise its labour market by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission (EC), and following intense lobbying from foreign investors, Romanian officials demolished the country’s power to bargain with employers for decent wages, and pushed people from stable jobs into precarious circumstances.

Labour researchers believe over 40 per cent of workers in Romania are on the minimum wage, if unofficial jobs are factored into the figures. Meanwhile, the latest Government data shows that around 30 per cent of total contracts pay the national minimum wage or under. This is still a massive number, and contrasts with nine per cent in Germany.

“In other countries, the minimum wage is the ceiling below which you shouldn’t pay. In Romania, it is an orientation mark!” says Stephan Meuser, head of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Romania, a political foundation close to Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

So what is stopping the Government from securing a better than minimum wage from west European big business, who are shifting production and services eastward?

Its own laws.