To carry out its duties provided by law, to establish the number of in the mayor’s specialist structure, the specialist structure of the county council, as well as in the local public institutions set up by decisions of the decision-making authorities, local administration authorities to observe the maximum number of positions.
(2) The maximum number of positions provided in par. (A) shall not apply and budgetary chapters "Education" and "Insurance and Social Assistance”, financed by local budgets and budget chapter "Health", regardless of the financing source.
Emergency Ordinance 63/2010 causes major chaos and dysfunction in the system of performance institution in Romania, subordinated to local administration. The number of employees became dependant on the population groups - the number of inhabitants – in cities, counties etc... Institutions are required to lay off employees with no prior consultation with their managers, knowingly.
The authority of these institutions in the public space is related to their mechanism of representation, which should be relevantly considered before being precariously truncated. In a context where there is no expertise of the cultural policy in those institutions, the measures are arbitrary and destabilizing. You cannot reduce the personnel in a theatre without a detailed analysis of how the concerned theatre functions; just as it is absurd to place city hall employees and theatre employees in the same melting pot. These are two structures with completely different types of operational behaviour. A specific organizational chart, adjusted to its specific model and working method, should be drawn up for each of them.
Theatres are anyway facing a situation keeping them in an optimal organizational deficit. Most of them have blocked vacancies, which forces them to all sorts of artifices and to use their employees on other positions than those they are qualified for. In these circumstances, the phrasing in the Emergency Ordinance 63 “the maximum number of positions” is absurd, since there is currently a minimum resistance fund for functioning in theatres depending on local financing. There is no theatre with a surplus of technical staff to give an example for only one level. To the contrary, all theatres are complaining with the increasingly acute lack of technical personnel. Theatres that not only have two rooms in one building, but also two completely separate areas for performance (Bulandra, Mic Theatre) are forced to share technical staff for the performances they play. An employee's illness came to jeopardize the representations, because backup solutions are fewer and fewer.
Any personnel cu of requires a thorough knowledge of the system where the cut of is enforced. Otherwise we may witness an impossibility of public action and a beheading of the institutions with disastrous effects on a long-term. Given that there is no prospection report for the activity of theatres - with the required distinctions - able to work in conditions of severe cuts of, the reducing substantially affect the efficiency and integrity of the theatre system, its mode of operation in communities it belongs to. The first two lines in the Emergency Ordinance no. 63 come into contradiction with the measures that theatres are forced to take: “Considering the need to optimize the activity of the local public institutions and improve management in consideration of reducing local expenses”. Both optimization and management quality are severely amputated by the cuts of proposed by the Ordinance.
On the other hand, “the number in the specialist structure of the Mayor, the specialist structure of the county council, as well as that of local public institutions”, provided in the Ordinance, can only be a constant multiple. Each specialist structure has it own internal organization regulations and becomes operative only as long as the framework in which it functions is very well known. The questions worth a public debate are: how appropriate is the number of operators (artists and technical staff) in the specialist structure in integrates to and who established the limits of the appropriate? The answers should be based on expertise.
Since the reduction in technical staff is, under current circumstances, impossible, there is still the question of the artistic staff. And here, given that we are dealing with a system - the theatre one – where workability effects are not quantifiable on short term – the lay off becomes problematic. Who will the director lay of? -
- The actors who have not played in the last seasons? There is a manager with vision not responsible to create projects parallel to performance, to involve the entire company?
- The actors that he just hired, in the happier situations?
- The young, unmarried and without children?
- A maximum number of employees set according to what types of projects and programs?
It is certainly need for a renovation and a rethinking of the performance institutions in Romania, of their intimate operating structure, but by no means through such a type of Ordinance, which destabilizes, with no safeguards, the Romanian theatre system and which blows up a cultural market poor as is.
This ordinance fundamentally affects the status of the collaborating actor, who will no longer find his place, despite his performance, in the organisational chart of theatres facing with massive reductions.
It seems however that there are too many details to consider for an Ordinance drawn up on a table’s corner, chaotically and destructively.
