PSD launches petition to protect rights of Romanian workers in EU

Social Democratic Party (PSD) has launched a petition online by which it asks for the support of the European Parliament to ensure that the European laws in terms of social and medical protection and the rights of the Romanian workers as Romanian citizens are being observed in the European Union. "In the last period, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, an important number of Romanian workers were transported to various EU member states for seasonal work or social type of activities based on bilateral agreements concluded between the respective countries and the Romanian Government. The agreements that do not observe the European regulatory framework on free movement and the right to work in the European area" shows the petition posted on Saturday on the Facebook page of PSD. According to this document, the aforementioned bilateral agreements represent "a method that risks to undermine the European standards in social protection and require thus the attention of the European institutions." "Unfortunately, the Romanian Government, led by the representatives of the National Liberal Party, did not establish adequate measures of social or medical protection absolutely necessary in the context of the current crisis. The lack of involvement of the Government led to the situation where the Romanian workers were exposed to risks that contradict the national regulations regarding the protection of workers and the social distancing rules. These situations break European recommendations in the field. This could have been avoided if the Liberal decision-maker factors were concerned with the fate of the Romanian workers abroad and observed the European recommendations in the field," said the same source. The Social Democrats gave as an example "a series of aspects that the mass media presented in detail such as inadequate transportation (by bus or by plane), the bad organisation of the employers who took over the workers (crowding, agreements signed just before boarding etc), imposing transportation costs on the persons who were hired, concluding the employment agreements unilaterally without observing the rights of the employees, without supporting testing costs or costs with the protection of the employees or contractual conditions below the social standards regulated at the level of member states or recommended by the EU." The petition, launched with the support of PES Activists Romania, is to be submitted to the European Parliament in order to ask the European institutions to analyze the aforementioned situations and to impose respect for workers' rights in accordance with European recommendations and regulations. "This notification represents an approach by which we come to the support of Romanian workers while protecting their right to work where they want and supporting the families of these workers in the country, who would like to know that their relatives are protected, even when they go to work. "We show the inability of the current ruling party to use European mechanisms to protect Romanian citizens. This petition will be accompanied by examples and particular cases of violations of social rights," the document reads. AGERPRES (RO - editor: Catalin Alexandru; EN - author: Cristina Zaharia)