If at the end of summer employees were demanding high salaries, due to the acute lack of specialists, in this year’s last quarter they have started to worry about their posts, and are willing to accept lower monthly income to keep their jobs.
In October, when Romania began feeling the effects of the international economic crisis, former Minister of Labor, Mariana Campeanu, estimated that there would be 17,000 layoffs by the end of the first quarter of 2009. By the time the new Minister of Labor, Marian Sarbu, was appointed, the estimate already exceeded 54,000 unemployed. However, Sarbu said he was “less pessimistic,” about the situation on the job market, and promises to create 45,000 new jobs in 2009, most in infrastructure.
