Solicitud directa (CEACR) - Adopción: 2013, Publicación: 103ª reunión CIT (2014)

Convenio sobre la edad mínima, 1973 (núm. 138) - Rumania (Ratificación : 1975)

Article 2(1) of the Convention and Parts IV and V of the report form. Scope of application, labour inspection and application of the Convention in practice. The Committee previously noted that section 2 of the Labour Code applies only to persons employed under a work contract. It also noted that in several branches of activity children have been identified as being involved in intolerable and hazardous work in the formal and informal sectors by such professional bodies as the inspectorates responsible for labour, social welfare and child protection, education, health and of the police.

The Committee notes with interest the detailed information that the Government’s report contains on the inspectorates’ efforts to combat illegal employment, including child labour. The Committee notes that in 2012 the territorial labour inspectorates identified 72 cases of employers ignoring the minimum age for the employment of minors or disregarding their working conditions and informed the criminal investigation authorities accordingly. In addition, between 27 August and 8 September 2012 the labour inspectorate conducted a national campaign to prevent and combat the employment of children and young people under the age of 18, with the general purpose of raising employers’ awareness of their obligation to respect the rules governing children’s and young persons’ engagement to work. The campaign’s specific goals included identifying employers who take on young people under 18 years of age without any legal form of employment and encouraging them to draw up individual work contracts for young people who are in an irregular situation. The Government states that, during the campaign, the territorial labour inspectorates collaborated with the departmental payment agencies and social inspection agencies in organizing inspection teams and making their travel arrangements and that, where necessary, the inspection teams received support from the departmental police inspectorate. In the course of the campaign, 1,370 employers were inspected; 21 were sanctioned for employing manpower without any legal form of employment, and nine of these were sanctioned for employing young people between 15 and 18 years of age without an individual written contract. In all, 1,016 fines were imposed, 462 of them for failure to comply with legal provisions regarding the employment of minors. The fines amounted in total to 563,500 Romanian New lei (RON), of which RON100,000 were for using the labour of young people between 15 and 18 years of age without an individual written contract and RON148,600 for failing to comply with legal provisions regarding the employment of minors. Thirty-seven cases were brought before the criminal investigation authorities for employing minors in violation of the legal provisions regarding the minimum age for employment or of the regulations governing the employment of minors. The Committee requests the Government to continue providing information on the manner in which the Convention is applied, including statistics on the employment of children and young people and extracts from labour inspection reports indicating the number and nature of infringements of the law concerning children and young people, especially children working for their own account or in the informal economy, as far as possible disaggregated by age and sex.