Starting with May, all the personal assistants dismissed by the Chisinau City Hall will be employed by the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection within a new service. This is the Personal Support Service that will be created under the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, Minister Alexei Buzu informed at a press conference, being quoted by IPN.
According to the official, the creation of the service is a solution to “the crisis caused by the incompetence and indifference of the municipality”. “We ascertained that mayor Ceban dismissed about 650 personal assistants and abusively reduced the salary norm or actually reduced the salary for 550 personal assistants from Chisinau. We are talking about 1,200 personal assistants whose basic rights were brutally violated,” said Alexei Buzu.
The minister noted that starting with Tuesday, compensatory payments had been made to 1,200 personal assistants from Chisinau. These will be able to collect the one-off payments in the amount of 5,000 lei in two weeks. Similar payments will be granted in April and from May they will be hired. “We will continue to insist that justice be done for these people. We will go to court and all the responsible institutions so that they clarify this issue because what mayor Ceban did is an extremely dangerous precedent and is unfair towards the most vulnerable people,” said the minister.
In this connection, the Chisinau City Hall came with a reaction, saying that the statements and actions of those from the PAS government are limited to everything that is related to Chisinau and the Chisinau City Hall. “The government causes serious problems in Chisinau and then politicizes the issue and says that it is solving these problems, including the situation of personal assistants, when they cut funding for these employees specifically in Chisinau. This thing was also realized by the personal assistants who were misled and told that the City Hall is to blame, and when they understood that it was the political game of the Government, the people called them to account, but they allegedly solve the problem by giving instructions to the Chisinau City Hall and with money from the municipal budget,” the municipality said.
According to the Chisinau City Hall, it is the duty of the Government to treat all the citizens of the country equally. “We remind that only Chisinau and ATU Gagauzia were discriminated against by the Government and those funds within the “Restart” program for personal assistants were cut. The Government is directly responsible for this. The peeople expect results, not political statements from TV screens,” reads the issued statement.
Hundreds of personal assistants in Chisinau, especially of retirement age, were laid off, and those who remained had their wages halved after the municipal authorities announced that they no longer had money to pay them and would not hire new personal assistants who submitted applications. The City Hall accused the central authorities of not including Chisinau municipality in the social assistance reform “Restart” through which the Personal Assistance service from January 1, 2024 has been financed with state budget funds, while the personal assistants were transferred under the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection. The central authorities invoked, in turn, that Chisinau municipality and the administrative-territorial unit of Gagauzia have sufficient possibilities to finance the salaries of personal assistants from their own incomes, but also from special-purpose transfers from the state budget.
