site.btaProposed Interior Ministry Reform Gets Employers' Support, Unions' Opposition

Proposed Interior Ministry Reform Gets Employers' Support, Unions' Opposition

Sofia, April 11 (BTA) - The trade unions took a firm stand against the scrapping of social perks by proposed changes to the Interior Ministry Act while the employers' organizations said they want to see even braver changes. They made their positions clear at a meeting of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation in Sofia on Monday.

The package of changes proposed by the team of Interior Minister Roumyana Buchvarova includes reducing the annual paid leave to 25 days from the present 30 and cutting back on the retirement package to 12 from the current 20 wages as of the start of 2017 for newly employed officer.

The President of the National Union of Firemen and Rescuers in Bulgaria, Ventsislav Stankov, said that his union is opposed to all of the above.

What they support is having the whole Interior Ministry administration transition to the rules in the Civil Servant Act with the exception of some employees such as the professors of special subjects in the Interior Ministry Academy.

The reform package also includes removing some administrative services from the Interior Ministry into a new service centre. The Director General for Fire Safety and Protection of the Population is to be transformed into an executive agency. Another executive agency will be set up to take charge of the social activities of the Ministry.

The Union of the Civil Administration in the Interior Ministry expressed support for the proposed administrative reform. They argued, however, that the wages to full-time employees have remained too low and the principle of setting the monthly wages should change so as to peg them to the average wage in the public sector.

This Union is adamant that when employees in the Interior Ministry administration are made civil servants (as per the Civil Servant Act rather than the Interior Ministry Act), they should be paid a compensation.

The President of the Association of Industrial Capital in Bulgaria (AICB), Vassil Velev, said that his organizations supports the proposed changes in the Interior Ministry Act and finds them belated and insufficient. He said the business community would support braver reforms.

Velev also said that what is needed is more police cameras and not more police officers; more equipment and not more fuel for the patrol cars.

He noted that Bulgaria holds the second place in the EU in terms of budget appropriations for security and is also way above the EU average in terms of the security budget-to-GDP ratio.

Velev also said that if the reduction of the retirement package to 12 wages is seen as a problem for the motivation of police officers, "there can always be someone ready to pay more than 20 wages to officers to not protect us".

The leader of the Podkrepa Labour Confederation, Dimiter Manolov, said that the proposed reforms apparently boil down to "making sure that people whose perks now allow them to be better off than the rest, become as bad off as everybody else".