"How Romania sold out its workers to foreign investors for IMF and EU cash", 24 Oktober 2017

Romania’s leaders sold off their citizens’ rights and kept their wages at rock-bottom to satisfy foreign investor lobbyists and billion-Euro lenders from the EU and IMF, argue labour experts and unions... Forced to liberalise its labour market by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission (EC), and following intense lobbying from foreign investors, Romanian officials demolished the country’s power to bargain with employers for decent wages, and pushed people from stable jobs into precarious circumstances. Labour researchers believe over 40 per cent of workers in Romania are on the minimum wage, if unofficial jobs are factored into the figures. Meanwhile, the latest Government data shows that around 30 per cent of total contracts pay the national minimum wage or under... [C]ould this method of deregulation spread beyond Romania? [...] "Representatives of both employers’ associations and unions consider that Romania was used as a ‘guinea pig’ by foreign investors with the support of the so-called Troika (IMF, EC, World Bank), to decentralize collective bargaining radically,” according to a 2016 European Journal of Industrial Relations study...