Romanian railway employees plan to protest at central station, waiting for the premier to show up
Protesters from Romania’s National Railway Company (CFR) plan to cry out dissatisfactions at the central station Gara de Nord, after marching to the government, waiting for the prime minister to show up, union leader Ion Molea said.
The police authorized the protest until 2.30 p.m. today, but if the 10,000 people plan to continue, it will be hard to stop them, Molea said.
Employees are upset with the transportation minister’s refusal to communicate with them after planning to slash about 12,000 jobs in the company to cut costs. The minister is currently in the Czech Republic.
This morning protesters gathered in front of the Transportation Ministry, close to Gara de Nord, to hand in a petition with their requests, according to another union leader, Gheorghe Popa.
Their claim is that firing of personnel close to the retirement age be halted and solicit the Cabinet to intervene to stop the technical decline of the railway transportation system in Romania. Also, they demand urgent solutions to write off the company’s historic debts and support in buying electricity directly from suppliers, plus extra funds to insure infrastructure revamping.
Yesterday, a government secretary with the Transportation Ministry said that 3,781 people from the 62,894 employees will be dismissed, not close to 12,000 as unions say.
Two weeks ago, minister Radu Berceanu said that CFR will be boiling soon with the personnel changes he plans to make there. The minister said there are too many employees working with CFR’s divisions. On March 20 he announced that 12,139 people will be dismissed.
As a consequence, on March 26 over 1,000 employees gathered at the central station Gara de Nord to pledge for their jobs.
Other employees in the public system are unhappy with the measures taken by the government.
Staff working as auxiliary personnel in Romania’s justice is also mulling about calling a strike, asking that bonuses the granted to them too, not only to magistrates.
Teachers also threatened to call a big strike and even block the school year if the Cabinet applies either of the two measures it announced last week. Education employees had two options according to the central authorities, to either do without some of the bonuses or fire 20,000 teachers.
At the beginning of the year, the Cabinet announced plans to drastically cut spending by 20 percent in order to face the reducing collections to the budget, caused by the economic crisis which forced big companies to fire people and decrease production.