The minimum salary should represent 50% of the average official pay, in accordance with the Revised European Social Charter and the EU Directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union. The pays of education sector employees and throughout the public sector should be raised so that the average monthly salaries here are at least equal to the average monthly official pay, says a public call that was presented in a demonstration held on the occasion of International Workers’ Day, IPN reports.

The event was staged by the National Trade Union Confederation of Moldova on May 1 in front of the Railway Workers’ Palace of Culture. It involved the Confederation’s managers, leaders of national trade union offices, representatives of the Women’s Commission and the Youth Commission of the Confederation, trade union activists from different sectors of the national economy.

In connection with the granting of the EU candidate status to Moldova, the trade unionists called on Parliament, the Government and the National Employers Confederation to make concerted effort to design and adopt programs to fight the underground economy and concerning safety and health at work.

The call also urges to improve the law on the public pension system so as to ensure decent living conditions for all the recipients of pensions, including the mechanism for calculating and setting the early pension for long length of service, to urgently design and adopt the normative documents needed to implement the ILO Occupational Health Services Convention, to immediately adjust the legal framework on the State Labor Inspectorate to the relevant provisions of ILO Conventions, to promote gender equality and not to allow gender discrimination at work, etc.

May 1 commemorates the historic struggle of workers all over the world and is recognized in most of the countries. The 1 May date was chosen by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate a general strike in the United States, which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket affair four days later. Hundreds of thousands of Americans took then to the streets to demand an eight-hour workday without cuts in salaries.