Parental Leave

According to an old Romanian saying, being a mother is the hardest job of all, not to mention being unpredictable, as weve seen in recent years in Romania. Only one year after the Romanian authorities modified the provisions regulating parental leave, th

Eugen Cojocariu, 29.04.2012, 16:50

A new emergency ordinance in keeping with the European directive on parental leave came into effect as of March the 1st. The new regulation encourages fathers to be more present in their children’s lives. We spoke to Lacramioara Coches, the director of the General Social Assistance Directorate within the Romanian Ministry for Labour, Family and Social Protection. She told us more about this new government ordinance:

”After carrying out a number of studies, the European Union arrived at the conclusion that for men and women to have equal opportunities it is necessary that both members of the couple get involved in the raising and education of the children. The European Union therefore asked all its member states to introduce in their respective national legislations a law according to which each parent has to stay at home with the newborn child for at least one month starting on the 1st of March. This will mostly apply to fathers, as it is commonly known that in 90% of the cases it is the woman who stays at home with the child.”

This percentage can be explained if we look at a report made public in Brussels to mark European Equal Pay Day, which says that in Europe women earn nearly 17% less than men. Statistics show that in most cases the salary is the key factor in deciding which parent stays at home with the newborn baby. In Romania, parental leave is currently one or two years, as chosen by the parent. Under the new ordinance, the baby will have to spend at least one month of this period with the other parent.

For parents who refuse, this month will be deduced from the parental leave or allocated to the other parent, who will not, however, receive any allowance for it. Although it was hailed as a positive initiative, the ordinance in its present form has triggered a wave of criticism on the grounds that it does not take into account the reality of being a parent in Romania. With details, here is the president of a mothers’ rights group, Ana Maita:

”It is cynical to say that parents in Romania choose to have a baby based on financial calculations. The government wants to encourage people to be responsible when they decide to have a child, which means making sure they can afford to raise the child and provide for the child’s education, but at the same time it deprives middle class couples of legislative predictability. You simply cannot change the rules in the middle of the game.”

When this happens, parents are left with no choice but to resort to solutions that are not in the spirit of the European directive we spoke about earlier. Stefan Dumitrescu is about to become a dad. For a lawyer working with a private company, the new government ordinance is an infringement of parental rights.

“I myself don’t think it is good legislation, because it basically denies parents the leave that had already been set at precisely one or two years. Basically we are in the absurd situation in which the state gives you the right to stay home for a month, and if the parent refuses or doesn’t claim that month, then the rights of the parents and children are violated, because their leave is cut back”.

At the same time, an association militating for the rights of fathers stands against this legal measure, and suggested the government take a number of measures meant to encourage both parents to become involved in the life of their children. In a letter to the prime minister, the attorney of the association, Bogdan Draghici, said:

“Our proposal is for parents to be able to get, aside from this year of parental leave, a bonus for the other parent who also opts for the leave. We propose a period of three months on top of this year of leave, and since this is a longer period, measures can be taken in the workplace, such as finding staff able to replace the people who take three months leave for parenting, so as to cover the period recommended by experts for breastfeeding, creating favourable premises for recovering the huge losses we suffered in terms of earlier legislative changes. These changes concern the reduction of maternity leave and smaller child benefit contributions. We need to sustain the birth rate and keep families going, in order to have healthy children”.

Right now, 33,000 dads are on parental leave in Romania. Even if their number will increase through this law, some people argue that this will not solve all the problems. That is because in Romania fathers will have to fight a system that favours the mother. Here is Bogdan Draghici once again:

“We have a large problem in Romania when it comes to visiting sick children in hospital. A father who is on parental leave cannot spend a night in hospital at the bedside of their child. Hospital managers ask mothers and grandmothers to stay there – the female relatives. We are facing an absurd situation. The father on leave takes his child to the hospital because the child is sick and he is told: you can’t stay, the mother has to be here. But the mother can’t be there because she doesn’t have childcare leave, because she can’t, since the father has taken it. There are a lot of problems to be solved against a legal framework that is based on the principle of ‘We’ll see what happens’. “

For the time being, the parents of children born after 1 March 2012 have to give their partner a month of the legally granted leave. Polls show that few couples in Romania are ready to put this new directive into practice, preferring to go back to work sooner rather than disrupt the functioning of the family and the life of their child.