Bulgaria's Podkrepa Labor Confederation is leaving the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation and demands the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Simeon Djankov over his plans to increase the retirement age by a year as of January 2012.

In a Friday interview for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), Evgeni Dushkov, Chair of Podkrepa's National Strike Committee, explained that the step contradicted the government's initial commitment to up the retirement age in 2021.

"We call on Prime Minister Borisov to reconsider Djankov's remaining in office. Two years ago it was him who said that the pension contributions would be reduced by two percentage points. He also vowed to fetch serious money, one way or another. We saw how far he got with the money-fetching and with the reduction. Last year, pension contributions had to go up again, but rather than checking why there was no money, the easiest thing to do was to slash incomes or to increase the retirement age," Dushkov stated.

He made it clear that the management of Podkrepa had tasked its National Strike Committee with organizing protests against the new salary scheme for public administration employees envisaging a suspension of experience related bonuses.

"This is a set of purely subjective criteria which does not include even one single objective standard for work evaluation. Under the scheme, it will more or less be the direct manager who will decide who gets the money and who doesn't. Even if a task has been successfully executed, there are no guarantees that the employee will get the full payment," Dushkov argued.

The Chair of Podkrepa's National Strike Committee emphasized that the Parliament's decisions would determine the necessity of staging protests.

 On Thursday, the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB) also voiced plans to leave the tripartite council of the government, employers and unions, and to hold demonstrations against the fast-track pension reform.

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