An Analysis of Public Pay Policy from the Perspective of Ethical and Legal Principles. Case Study: Draft Law on Public Employees’ Pay

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the public pay policy of Romanian public employees from the perspective of certain mandatory principles in this respect. Thus, we consider that a few relevant methodological aspects should be considered in the elaboration of the bill on the salaries of the public employees, in order to minimize the potential negative social impact; these aspects are: a) Through pilot studies, the bill should avoid the effects such as the law of unintended consequences. The unitary wage law of budgetary staff has a public policy nature. Any public policy assumes the risk of confronting the law of unintended consequences, in particular the Cobra effect (governors’ good intention has a contrary effect); b) Evidence-based action. Interventions must be based on prior studies and the political decision must be preceded by technical analysis. The absence of technical analyses is one of the major drawbacks of this political initiative, and evidence of inadequacy is already visible; c) The rules for the construction of the entire project must be defined beforehand. In other words, the construction must be based on clear principles and rules, capable of generating reasonable predictions on its consequences. We reviewed the bill from these perspectives. The study includes short impact assessments both on the medical staff – doctors, nurses and nursing staff – and on the non-medical staff. In this way, we have demonstrated some of the problems faced by this initiative regarding public employee pay policy.