Although the number of manufacturing companies in Romania is three times lower than the number of retail companies (almost 170,000), the former have created the largest workforce base in the local economy in the last few years, by employing more than 800,000 people.
The retail sector employed almost 770,000 people last year, almost 4% fewer than the manufacturing companies.
“It is not necessarily strange for manufacturing companies to have more employees than retail companies because some industries have managed to build a real ecosystem around them,” says Florin Godea, country manager of Adecco Romania, a recruitment and temporary workforce leasing company.
“If we look at the companies in the automotive sector we will see they prefer to work only with local companies for the raw material. That gives them greater bargaining power when dealing with their suppliers, so they get much lower costs.”
As the workforce grows older, however, even if manufacturing is the biggest employer in the SME area, things might change. Many manufacturing companies are saying that the average age of their employees is over 40 to 45 years and when time comes for those people to retire, they might not have enough human resources to choose their replacements from. This scenario has no way of turning into an optimistic scenario since the young population is dwindling and not showing any particular interest in learning a trade.
About 1.5 million people employed by SMEs worked for retail and manufacturing businesses last year, which means more than 56% of the total number of employees in SMEs and almost 35% of the total number of employees in Romania (public and private sector) earned low wages.
These two sectors are among those that pay the lowest wages, 1,000 to 1,500 lei in net amount per month (EUR224-EUR336), with only the automotive companies (over RON2,200 in net amount), pharmaceutical manufacturers (over RON3,000 in net average wage) and tobacco products manufacturing industry (over RON5,000 net average wage per month) paying more.
A SME has three (real estate, consultancy and research) to 15 employees (manufacturing) on average, according to European Commission data.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)