Collective bargaining is no longer relevant only for large employers or heavily unionised sectors. Under Romania’s current social dialogue framework, the obligation to negotiate collectively applies at company level to employers with at least 10 employees/workers.
For many businesses, this remains one of the most overlooked labour law obligations — not because it is unclear, but because it is often mistaken for an obligation to conclude a collective labour agreement. That is not what the law requires.
What the law requires is that the negotiation process be properly initiated and conducted.
What is actually mandatory
Romanian Social Dialogue Law no. 367/2022 makes collective bargaining mandatory at the level of units with at least 10 employees/workers. The same law also makes collective bargaining mandatory at sector level, but from an employer’s operational perspective the most immediate impact is at company level.
This means that employers falling within that threshold must be able to show that they have:
triggered or responded to the bargaining process;
identified the employee-side participants lawfully entitled to negotiate;
gone through the negotiation phase in accordance with the legal framework.
The obligation is therefore one of process and proof, not necessarily one of final agreement.
What the law does not require
This distinction matters.
The law does not force the parties to actually sign a collective labour agreement in every case. What matters is that collective bargaining was genuinely initiated and carried out. This has been one of the key practical clarifications under the post-2022 framework.
For employers, this means that the real exposure is often not the failure to conclude, but the failure to demonstrate that the negotiation process was opened and handled correctly.
Who negotiates on behalf of employees
Where there is a representative trade union, the negotiation is conducted with that union. Where there is no such union, the law allows employees’ interests to be represented by elected employee representatives. Law no. 367/2022 also eased some of the rules around worker representation compared to the prior framework.
This is often where implementation starts to break down in practice.
Many employers know they have crossed the 10-employee threshold, but have not addressed the representation issue in time. Without a properly configured employee-side counterpart, the negotiation process becomes vulnerable from a compliance perspective.
Timing matters more than many employers think
The timing rules are not merely administrative.
Specialist commentary on the current law consistently points out that the negotiation process should be initiated in due time, including at least 60 days before the expiry of an existing collective agreement or addendum where such agreement already exists, and that the ordinary negotiation period is 45 days, unless extended by agreement.
Even where no agreement is eventually signed, employers should be able to document:
when the process was initiated;
who was invited to negotiate;
what meetings took place;
whether proposals and counterproposals were exchanged;
how the process concluded.
Why this is a real compliance issue
The reason this matters is simple: collective bargaining now sits at the intersection of labour compliance, employee relations and documentary risk.
In practice, employers are exposed where they:
ignore the threshold;
assume that lack of union means lack of obligation;
postpone the process because “nothing will come out of it anyway”;
treat the requirement as a purely formal exercise without maintaining proper records.
This is particularly risky because, under the current framework, the discussion is no longer whether collective bargaining is relevant for SMEs or mid-size employers. For many of them, it is simply a legal requirement.
What employers should be doing now
From a practical legal perspective, the correct approach is not to wait for conflict.
Employers that meet the threshold should verify, as a minimum:
whether they have crossed or maintained the 10-employee threshold;
whether there is a representative trade union or employee representatives in place;
whether the collective bargaining process has been initiated within the relevant timeline;
whether the file contains sufficient written evidence of the process.
In other words, this is one of those areas where compliance is built before the dispute, not during it.
Conclusion
Collective bargaining in Romania is no longer a labour law issue relevant only to large employers. It is a recurring compliance obligation for any business that reaches the statutory threshold.
The legal risk does not lie primarily in failing to sign a collective labour agreement. It lies in failing to initiate, conduct and document the negotiation process in accordance with the law.
For employers, the practical question is not whether collective bargaining will lead to an agreement, but whether the company is in a position to prove that it handled the legal obligation properly.