Thousands gathered on June 16 to march in protest against the Cabinet’s economic stimulus plan, demanding a more "people-oriented" approach to fighting the economic recession.

Plamen Dimitrov, the vice-president of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB), which organised the rally, said that the protesters wanted a new consensus plan backed both by the Cabinet and opposition, as well as labour unions and employer organisations. "We want this anti-crisis programme to be financially guaranteed and include  measures that would ease the burden on the people," Bulgarian news agency BTA quoted Dimitrov as saying.

A declaration filed with the Prime Minister’s office, but addressed to seven of Bulgaria’s biggest political parties, asked for state guarantees that public sector salary hikes planned for July 1 2009 would not be cancelled. Furthermore, the labour union asked the Cabinet to increase the minimum monthly wage to 340 leva in July and then again to 400 leva in

October 2009. The minimum wage now is 220 leva.
CITUB claimed that the rally gathered 12 000 people, but police estimates said the figure was closer to 3000 people.

While labour unions have bemoaned in recent months the stimulus policies of Sergei Stanishev’s Cabinet, official statistics say that Bulgarian households are yet to feel the full brunt of the economic recession.

The National Statistical Institute (NSI) said on June 15 that in April the average income of Bulgarian households was 755.83 leva, an increase of 7.9 per cent over the same month of 2008. Inflation over the 12 months ending in April was 4.8 per cent. The statistics board’s data is based on a monthly survey of 3000 statistically-representative households.

Household income dropped sharply in January, falling by more than a quarter from 925.28 leva in December 2008 to 679.94 leva in January. It had less to do with the economic recession and more with the end-of-year bonuses paid by most Bulgarian companies. Since January, household income has increased by 11.2 per cent in April.

Wages, which account for more than half of the total household income, have increased by 7.4 per cent year-on-year in April, but analysts have warned that mounting unemployment in coming months could eat into the share of wages in household income and the final figure.

Bulgaria has so far avoided the worst of the recession-induced redundancies, the ranks of the unemployed rising by only 19 618 in the 12 months to April. Employers organisations, however, have warned that Bulgaria was yet to see the biggest wave of job cuts, which was expected to sweep the country in the autumn.

Despite wage revenue rising, labour productivity was on the decline, according to NSI data. In the first quarter of the year, the time-adjusted individual labour productivity was down 3.1 per cent compared to the same period of 2008.

Labour costs, which include both salaries and non-wage costs, however, increased by 18.6 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2009, well above the European Union average of 1.5 per cent, according to Eurostat data published on June 16.