Casual work in the form of contractual day-labour has been legally endorsed in Romania by the Law 52/2011, which followed shortly the revised labour code (Law 40/2011) that significantly deregulated the labour market and limited trade unionism. In its initial version, the law represented a sharp departure from the principles of social insurance and historically established labour rights such as the right to a minimum national gross wage or collective labour contracts. While the subsequent revisions of the law, especially in 2014 and 2015, introduced some more responsibilities for the beneficiaries of day labour, the exemption from the payment of social insurance contributions (pensions, health care, unemployment, and paid sick and maternity leaves) had been maintained, and insurance remained voluntary and fully covered by the day-labourers. The rationale to grant the legal possibility of using day-labour consisted of tackling undeclared work, especially in the large agricultural sector that extensively employed seasonal workers. The new law granted the possibility of employment on a daily basis, with the minimum obligation to pay the flat-rate income tax (16%) and to provide for the hospitalization/ funeral costs in case of workplace accidents. Minors aged 15 can work as day-labourers only with the written approval of their parents. A maximum of 90 days/year can be worked as day-labour for the same beneficiary, with the exception of agriculture, where the threshold was extended to 100 days/year. The domains where day-labour can be performed were set by the law and the nature of work restricted to unqualified labour. The leasing of day-labourers for a third party was prohibited. Economic agents that utilize day-labour should submit monthly a register to the Labour Inspection, signed by each labourer. As compared to 2011, when cca. 170.5 thousand day-labourers were registered, by 2016 their number increased 4.7 times, reaching 803.6 thousand persons. Their share in the total labour force expanded from 1.2% in 2011 to 6.7% in 2016. The number of legal entities using day-labour also increased from 4.8 thousands in 2011 to 24.1 thousands in 2015. According to the statistics of the Labour Inspection, 80% of day-labour is performed in agriculture (including vineries, orchards and animal husbandry), forestry and fisheries. This sector typically employs persons with lower levels of education, who at times combine seasonal work abroad with casual work in Romania. A smaller share of day-labour was registered in the case of organizing events or leisure activities, more frequent in urban areas and typically employing students. Given that "day-labourer" does not constitute a statistical category for occupied persons in the reports of the National Institute for Statistics, there is a lack of publicly available information and reliable micro-data that could allow the demographic profiling of day-labourers, as well as estimations regarding their uptake of various social protection benefits and services. However, given the unqualified nature of work, prevalence in the agricultural sector, and low incomes, most probably they can hardly afford paying voluntarily all social insurance contributions. For 2017, the estimated loss of the public social insurance systems due to the replacing of regular employment contracts at the minimum wage with day-labour is around 1,824 million Ron. Since 2015 it has become legally possible to cumulate income from day-labour with social assistance benefits granted under the law on the Guaranteed Minimum Income (Law 416/2001, GMI), and, as a collateral provision under GMI, to benefit from public health care insurance covered from the national budget. Consequently, in the particular case of day-labourers who lack imputable assets that would disqualify them from GMI, and who are willing to perform the required community work, there is a cross-subsidizing of labour. The main beneficiaries of this cross-subsidizing are the economic agents from the agricultural sector, as they employ the largest share of day-labour.
