The highest salary in the Republic of Moldova is 35,880 lei, while the lowest one is 1,200 lei, which is a difference of about 33 times. The ratio recommended by the International Labor Organization is 12 to 1. Moldova is yet far from this proportion. By the new salary reform, the ratio will be decreased to 15 to 1 and equity will be thus ensured in the current salary system in the budgetary sector, Minister of Finance Octavian Armașu stated in the meeting of the Government’s press club, IPN reports.
The minister noted the necessity of adopting the new salary law derived from the wide inequities in the incomes of different categories of budget-funded employees. There are several groups of employees whose salaries are set by different mechanisms and there are several laws that govern this area. There is now a wide discrepancy between the highest and lowest salaries and the goal is to reduce this discrepancy.
According to Octavian Armașu, the reform will benefit the employees with low salaries. Most of the public functionaries have salaries set by a tariff system that hasn’t been modified for over ten years and they didn’t get pay raises in the period. Mechanisms for indexing the salaries are applied, but the discrepancies are wide. Under the current salary law, a fixed, rigid tariff salary is set for each post and the basic salary cannot be modified.
The new law institutes a flexible salary system in the budgetary sector. The system will have 130 pay classes with a reference value for each of these. If the reference value is modified, the pay grades are also modified and there won’t be fixed salaries. The fixed part and variable part of the salary will also be regulated. Earlier, even if the salaries were fixed, bonuses and suppleness were added to the variable part. Under the new law, the fixed part of the salary will account for a bigger share of the salary income and there will be a small variable part, which will be an additional stimulus to the salary for increasing efficiency.
“We want to have pay raises of 10% on the variable part for public functionaries, of 20% for most of the categories of employees and of 30% for such areas as the national defense, state security and public order,” stated the minister, adding some of the current variable bonuses, for qualification, special and diplomatic ranks, for scientific, honorific and other titles will be kept.
Octavian Armașu said the reference value next year will be 1,500 lei, as opposed to 1,100 lei in 2018. It was estimated that the reference value during the next two years will rise by another 200 lei. A sum of 1.3 billion lei will be earmarked in the 2019 public budget for pay raises in the whole budgetary system. “The law guarantees that no one will have a salary lower than 2,000 lei. Even if the tariff salary with all the bonuses and raises will be lower, the employee will receive a kind of supplement to the salary that will raise it to 2,000 lei,” he stated.
According to the minister, the new law on the salary system in the budgetary sector will not allow decreasing the reference value.
