site.btaParliament Adopts at First Reading Revisions to Employment Promotion Act

Parliament adopted on first reading amendments to the Employment Promotion Act on Thursday that aim to encourage the inclusion in the labour market for the large group of people in Bulgaria who are neither in employment nor in education. The revisions were submitted by MP Denitsa Sacheva of the formerly ruling GERB-UDF, among other MPs, and were adopted with 135 votes in favour and 11 abstentions. No one voted against.

Some 900,000 Bulgarians neither work nor study, according to data of the National Employment Agency, the European Commission, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, cited by the authors of the revisions.

There is a large pool of inactive people and the National Employment Agency currently helps a fraction of those to enter or re-enter the labour market due to legislative gaps. The MPs who submitted the bill believe that the amendments would enable the Agency to interact actively with other institutions and reach the unemployed people in working age, helping them in finding jobs.

They aim to stimulate the entry in the market of unemployed persons aged 16 to 64 years and introduce an electronic register to the National Employment Agency to keep the details of those persons in a data base. Such a register will not be public and the information in it will not be accessible under the Access to Public Information Act.

MPs from all parliamentary groups supported the bill during the discussions at the National Assembly’s plenary sitting.