Trade unions to provide protection to non-EU workers coming to work in Romania

The National Trade Union Bloc (BNS) will award membership to non-EU workers who are working or coming to work in Romania in order to inform them about their rights and to protect their rights, BNS reported on Thursday.

The BNS initiative comes as Romania has increased from 25,000 to 50,000 the contingent of non-EU workers who can apply for employment in Romania this year.

"The National Trade Union Bloc has taken note of the decision of the Romanian government to increase the contingent of third country workers to 50,000 people. As a consequence, the BNS Executive Bureau, meeting today, August 12, 2021, decided to initiate internal procedures, together with representatives of the member federations from different fields (construction and construction materials, hospitality, agriculture, machine building industry, etc.), in order to take over as union members the non-EU citizens coming to Romania for work, insofar as they will want to exercise their right to free association," according to BNS, agerpres reports.

BNS has prepared information packages relevant to this type of workers addressing the mandatory labour standards in Romania (minimum wage, working hours, working conditions on weekends, occupational health and safety for each field, etc.) as well as other parts of the national legislation concerning both the living conditions and labour law in Romania.

"This information will be made available both to workers who are already in the country, and especially to those who intend to come to Romania for work. It will also ensure the prior information of workers who are about to arrive in Romania, both on the manner and conditions under which individual employment contracts and possible additional acts are to be concluded, as well as on other aspects to support those workers to avoid concluding contracts with abusive clauses or to fall prey to human traffickers," according to BNS.

BNS will communicate both with Romanian employers, to ensure compliance with employment contracts by both parties, and with public institutions such as the labour inspectorate (for violations of employment contracts and occupational health and safety standards) and the General Inspectorate for Immigration (for everything related to the right of residence of workers in Romania or the repatriation of foreign workers).

At the same time, BNS will sign, at the beginning of next week, a partnership aimed at informing, assisting and supporting workers from Nepal who are in Romania or who are coming for work and will propose similar partnerships to other categories of non-EU workers to ensure the protection of the rights of foreign workers.

Also, from September 15, a system will become operational that will allow each interested worker who joins the union to have an individual account opened on the BNS platform that allows them to be in permanent contact with the union and to report whenever there are problems they facing them.

The system has been operational and available to Romanian workers who are members of the BNS trade union since the end of 2016.