The job description and the Internal Regulation become mandatory again for micro-enterprises

Law 275/2022 was published in the Official Gazette on October 3rd, 2022, rejecting the provisions of the Emergency Ordinance 37/2021 which exempted micro-enterprises from a series of bureaucratic obligations. In Romania there are currently about 500.000 micro-enterprises with up to nine employees.

What exactly was the Emergency Ordinance 37/2021, published in the Official Gazette on 6th May 2021? The possibility for the micro-enterprise to no longer draw up the job description and the internal rules for employees. Also, for mobile employees, employees who worked at home and employees of micro-enterprises, the employer could keep track of the hours of work performed daily by each employee under the conditions established with the employees by written agreement. However, the emergency ordinance allowed the employee to oblige the micro-enterprise he worked for to communicate the job description in writing with the specification of the job duties. The key term of the ordinance was the reduction of bureaucracy and reduction of the administrative costs of the employer.

The arguments underlying the vote to reject OUG no. 37/2021 are, among other things, the fact that “the small entrepreneur will be subject to enormous risks, especially in front of the courts that will not have the tools to control a particular dispute. Employers will also be “discovered” before labor inspectors; they will have to settle workers’ petitions without concrete benchmarks, the only argument being “the employee’s word against the employer’s word”.

With the publication of Law 275/2022, things are brought back to where they started before the so-called “reduction of bureaucracy”.