Minister of Labour: “All people want to work. The speech about social assistance is an excess”
Invited to “Interviurile Adevărul”, the Minister of Labor also spoke about a sensitive topic, which often polarizes society: social benefits. Florin Manole says that the sums offered by the state are small and no one could live on them, so in fact many work illegally.
The Minister of Labor, Florin Manole, at “Interviurile Adevărul”
“There is no one who can live in this country with 700 lei minimum income for inclusion”
Regarding the discourse surrounding social aid, Florin Manole stated:
“All people want to work. The talk about social assistance people living on benefits is an exaggeration, because there is no one who can live in this country or anywhere in the EU with 700 lei as a minimum inclusion income. Or with 600 lei unemployment. And if we add all this up, no one can live on 1,000 lei. Someone who appears to be living off welfare alone may, to some extent, also be doing informal work or subsistence farming or black labor, which is a very big problem in this country.”
Illegal work also exists in the capital, said the minister. Who offered as an example a courier company, where 530 employees were discovered without legal forms.
What the minister says about the rights of foreign workers
A problem discovered as a result of the controls remains the non-respect of the rights of foreign workers. The minister used harsh terms, such as human trafficking.
“I had thematic control over the area of foreign workers and found abuses against those people and their rights that were not respected. .(…) When I spoke about the decrease in the quota, I did it knowing – just as those who criticized me know – that in fact 50,000 is the quota of workers that actually arrived in Romania. The rest, human trafficking or irregularities. (…) We have a document, we will make it transparent in soon, about how we tighten the control over the employment agencies that bring such work, how we make such people no longer vulnerable to employers who, not that they want to exploit them, some of them exploit them, because the ITM found cases.”, said Florin Manole.
You can watch the full interview with Irina Petraru below:
