Only half of the budget-paid employees are teachers, doctors, police officers, military people or magistrates, that is 680,000 people, namely those who actually provide a service in Romania, with the rest of the public sector employees providing support to them.

More than 36% of the employees who work for the state are support staff for the other budget-paid employees, reveal the data supplied to Ziarul Financiar by the Labour Ministry. This is the first publicly revealed statistics about budget-paid personnel. When the unitary wage system law was being debated, ZF asked the Government to provide data on the exact number of budget-paid employees by employee category, and the Government answered it did not have such data available.

At the end of the first quarter this year, there were 285,000 teachers working for the state, 76,000 police officers, 7,800 judges, 133,000 military people, 136,000 public servants and 175,000 medical staff, about 50,000 being doctors, according to previous estimates.

More than one third of the public sector employees, that is 485,000 are support staff. Bogdan Hossu, leader of the union confederation Cartel Alfa, says that 400,000 of the almost 500,000 people employed as support staff work in local and central public administration, that is ministries, governmental agencies and city halls. Moreover, the union leader says that during the negotiations over the unitary pay system law, the structure of the positions in the public sector was not discussed because of "the lack of a centralised statistics broken down into categories of public sector employees."

"Support staff includes those employees that do not work with laws and do not have a public servant status. It is usually made up of cashiers, drivers, logistics personnel or secretaries, archivists and the people who are part of dignitaries' staff," explains Geta D