Austerity and collective bargaining in Romania national report – Romania

In their seminal book on the models of eastern European capitalism, Bohle and Greskovits (2012) argue that Romania has a special type of neo-liberal society with weak state institutions, high centralisation and coverage of collective bargaining and relatively high mobilisation power of trade unions. Before the 2008 crisis, Romania had a comprehensive system of industrial relations with widespread collective bargaining at national, sectoral and establishment levels; the legal system supported the development of bi-partite and tripartite consultation and negotiation between trade unions, employers and the Government (Trif, 2010). However, this system was radically altered by the Government after the crisis, despite opposition from trade unions and the largest employers’ associations (Ciutacu, 2012). The legal changes led to the implosion of trade unions’ fundamental rights to bargain collectively, to form trade unions and to take industrial action. As a result, cross-sectoral collective agreements ceased to exist and very few multi-employer collective agreements were concluded after the new labour law was adopted in 2011. The crisis was used as a pretext by the centre-right government to reform the industrial relations system, with the support of the Troika of the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB