Romanian MPs have worked in Parliament less hours in five months compared to regular employee in one month

MPs have worked in the plenary sessions in the last five months less time than a regular employee spends at work in one month, shows an analysis of Mediafax newswire.

A regular employee with an 8-hour work schedule that has the weekends free, works around 176 hours monthly.

Senators have cumulated in 36 plenary meetings from February to June, including the extraordinary session in July, close to 104 work hours. In this period they had to debate and vote on bills, or make political statements. Deputies have had 35 plenary meetings, accounting for 94 hours. In this period, MPs have also attended eight common meetings of the two chambers of Parliament.

MPs have plenary meetings in the first two days of the week, while they work in the special committees up to Wednesday. From the middle of the week, most MPs are traveling out of Bucharest into their electoral circumscriptions, where in theory they are meeting with people in the local communities.

However, according to media reports, the offices of MPs in the circumscriptions are either hard to find, or are not open to the public.

MPs have had an additional one month break from working in Parliament in May as they had to work in the circumscription on the European Parliament elections. Aside from this, some of the meetings could not be held because there were not enough MPs showing up for work.

In one instance, a meeting of the Chamber of Deputies lasted for a record of just 24 seconds due to massive absenteeism. The average length of a plenary meeting of the Chamber of Deputies was 160 minutes, while in Senate it stood at 173 minutes, according to Mediafax.

Romania has 588 MPs following elections held in 2012, making the local Parliament one of the biggest in the EU. MPs have a monthly pay of at least RON 5,000 (EUR 1,131), also covering the 3-month vacation of the Parliament, during summer and winter.

The analysis also shows that the government was the biggest initiator of new bills, while the Parliament lags behind. Out of 110 draft bills that were passed by Parliament into law this year, 67 percent came from the government, while 31 percent were drawn up by MPs (this includes older draft bills that were proposed by MPs in previous years).