As organizations representing 82% of all employees in the country and producing 86% of the added value, we are outraged by statements in the National Assembly regarding our positions on the proposed draft budget of the country.
The budget is filled with funds produced by Bulgarian enterprises and the salaries paid by these enterprises. When this is not enough and deficits are created, governments oblige our state with loans. The fiscal contribution of all production in the country, in the form of direct and indirect taxes, supports the state administration, the security structures, the judiciary, including the people's representatives.
The attacks on those who produce, caused by their opinion on the draft budget, are an insult to enterprises that create value and duly pay all their obligations to the tax authorities. Such statements are a refusal to dialogue, a denunciation of the interaction between social partners and blow up all economic prospects. We understand that every investor – Bulgarian or foreign – is not welcome – even though it is the real sector that supports the salaries of civil servants, which are, moreover, permanently higher than those in the real sector.
With this draft budget, money is taken from every person working in the real sector, entrepreneur, employee, worker, every month – from 10 to over 100 leva, which will go towards an even greater second increase in the salaries of everyone in the state treasury – at least by 5%, and for some by 15%! Salaries whose increase in the previous year exceeded 50% for some categories.
As for “aid for business”, the over 10 billion leva paid as a “tax liability to society” between 2010 and 2020 by Bulgarian enterprises to the energy sector for subsidizing privileged production are conveniently ignored. These funds could have been invested in production assets and wage increases, instead of sinking into someone's pockets. In addition, enterprises, as well as every non-household consumer, over 11 billion leva were taken away, through high electricity prices, from which some of them returned to EVERY non-household consumer, including hospitals, schools, kindergartens, community centers, municipal and state institutions, as well as Parliament, as well as businesses (regardless of whether they were large or small), a little over 6 billion leva, and the difference remained in the energy sector.
Let us recall that this was also a common European policy according to the EU state aid rules, precisely in order to preserve the economy of the common union. Similar support was provided in all EU countries, in a much larger amount, through different mechanisms and for a much longer time. The effect of the support was that many industries survived, dozens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs were preserved, exports, which are a key element for economic growth, were preserved, and all of this together guaranteed the incomes of workers, stabilized the revenues in the treasury, which were redistributed to state departments and the bureaucratic class.
Particularly disappointing for Bulgarian society are the forgotten repeated promises by those who proposed the unacceptable draft budget - not to raise taxes, not to grow the state debt and to optimize the administration. The exact opposite is happening, as society is offered a budget of the status quo, a complete lack of perspective reforms and direct harm to people from the real sector - over three quarters of all workers.
If Bulgarian enterprises (small, medium, large) are drained, and not supported with a predictable and stable economic, political and social environment, the economy will collapse! The social consequences are easily predictable.
We insist on the full restoration of social dialogue and respect for the labor of all those employed in the real sector, and not for actions that seize their incomes – this is the statesmanlike and balanced concern for our society!
