Almost half of employees in Romania earn minimum salary (survey)

Almost 46 per cent of the employees in Romania are paid the minimum salary per economy, with the ones earning more than 700 euros representing a mere 16 per cent of the total, shows a survey into the dynamics of the labour market, considering the main hiring industries, conducted by the Romanian Local Investors Employers' Association (PIAROM), with the support of Labour Inspection.

"A worrying trend is the polarization of the workforce around the minimum salary per economy. We analyzed the gross basic salaries and we found that approximately 46 per cent of the labour agreements are in the area of the minimum salary - we are talking of figures valid on October 1 2017. And this happens while the employees earning more than 700 euros represent only 16 per cent of the labour agreements," Mihai Cioc, expert with PIAROM, told a press conference.

Another worrying aspect is related to the drop recorded in the number of specialists, meaning staff with higher education, while their is a surge in the number of unskilled workers.

"Another major imbalance has to do with the age distribution. We found that, while considering the skilled versus the unskilled workers, the weight of unskilled workers is very high in the under-30 age interval, basically double compared with the number of qualified workers. In other words, we found that the level of qualification of the generations coming from behind is lower than of the other generations, and we also discovered that there are also such jobs involving a major risk, in industry, technical jobs, of skilled workers, where most of the employees are above 50," said Cioc.

He showed that this happens because the technical and vocational education is not adapted to the requirements on the labour market.

The processing industry is the sector with the largest number of employees in Romania, 1.23 million respectively, followed by the commercial sector, with 889,515, transportation, logistics and storage - 381,000 labour agreements and constructions - 366,500 employees.