Valentin Petrescu, first vice-president of the Employers’ Federation of Building Companies – FPSC, said that beyond the EUR500 minimum wage, taxes must go down from some 40% to 20%, so as to avoid a significant rise in cost pressure.
In order to plug the labor drain to the West, the average wages in the construction sector must go up to EUR1,000 – EUR1,200, to be attractive to the Romanians working in Western Europe.
The net average wage of EUR500 for construction workers in Romania must become the minimum wage and should be exempt from income tax, to avoid pressure on companies in the sector, an incentive IT employees are already getting, the FPSC officials believe.
“There are about 300,000 workers in the construction sector in Romania but to meet the entire demand we need about 700,000 and we are seeing a heavy personnel turnover and found ourselves forced to bid for workers,” said Sorin Greu, vice-president of FPSC and CEO of Bog’art, the second largest Romanian builder.
Almost one in seven workers works for minimum wage in the books and the gets the rest under the table from the company owner’s dividends, he added.
“Construction sector should become a priority the same way the IT sector did in Romania. For instance, Austria made its construction sector a priority at some point,” said Liviu Simion, chairman of PSC-Rosims Trading.
“We now need a minimum wage of about EUR500 (some RON2,300) to contain or at least slow down the rate at which people are leaving the country. We’re having problems with engineers even because the number of Technical University of Civil Engineering (UCTB) students is dwindling and many are leaving the country.”
“The labor shortage will peak in 2020 when infrastructure projects begin in full gear (…) The capacity of the builder comes from the staff it has available,” said Cristian Erbasu, vice-president of FPSC and owner of one of the largest Romanian construction businesses.
Construction company owners have three solutions, he added.
“We need to bring back those who left and stop the drain as the Poles did, and if we still need more, the easiest and handiest solution is to import labor from Asia, but that is not a healthy solution.”
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)