SOME 500,000 PEOPLE TO LEAVE THE GREY ECONOMY

Only 2.8% of those working at home have labour contracts and their social security installments are being paid; National Council for Tripartite Cooperation agrees to set things in order in this sector.

Between 300,000 and 500,000 people working at home or from a distance should soon leave the grey sector of the economy and come out in the open. At present, only 2.8% of the people working at home have labour contracts and their social security installments are being paid, showed an analytical report, made public at the meeting of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation yesterday. The remaining 97.2% are not ensured - neither their social security installments nor their health insurance is being paid.

An attempt to solve these problems are the two national agreements - on home-based work and on distance work. Representatives of the Government, of employers and syndicates, signed them yesterday in the Council of Ministers in the presence of PM Boyko Borissov. The adoption of these agreements is part of the anti-crisis measures, drafted by the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation. The texts should be formatted as a bill and submitted to the Government for discussion.
 

"We guarantee that this will become a bill and be approved by the National Assembly, just as we agreed on the pension reform two weeks ago. It has already been adopted at first reading in Parliament. We will proceed in the same way with this document which gives a good regulation and an opportunity for a normal and working dialogue between labour and capital," commented PM Boyko Borissov.
 

The President of the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) Tsvetan Simeonov said that what the achievement made is an important signal to foreign investors, assuring them that Bulgaria is already economically stable. "Our country is among the first new EU member states that have regulations on home-based and distance work," added the head of the Association of Industrial Capital in Bulgaria Vassil Velev. The Chairman of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB) Plamen Dimitrov believes that the agreements will ease the labour market, but that amendments to the Labour Code, the Social Security Code, some to tax laws and the Safety Labour Act would be necessary in order to give them legislative meeting.