RIGHT TO ORGANISE AND FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION 0 In 2011, the Labour Code was substantially amended and a new Social Dialogue Law was adopted. The collective bargaining system changed fundamentally. National collective bargaining, which had previously set the minimum pay and the basic conditions for the entire economy, was abolished.“ The new legal framework decentralised collective bargaining by increasing the importance of collective agreements at company level and at industry level. Only companies hiring 21 employees or more are now under a legal obligation to enter into a collective bargaining agreement.”³³ Many companies operating in the garment industry hire less than 21 employees. Apart from decentralisation, the representativeness threshold changed too: a union may only be representative for collective bargaining purposes if it covers 50% of a company's employees plus 1(compared to the previous 30%). Before that, only 15 employees from several employers were necessary to form a union. Now, 15 employees of one employer make the necessary minimum. That not only makes forming unions more dif icult, but it also means that companies with less than 15 employees cannot have a union, which again impacts the garment industry that is very fragmented and is only formed of many micro irms. The rewritten regulations that govern sectoral relations have also reduced the protection of trade union leaders against dismissals. Moreover, the right to go on strike has been obstructed: a lawful strike may only be started after the CBA(collective bargaining agreement) expires or while collective bargaining is underway. Even if the CBA is violated by the employer, a strike cannot be called as long as a CBA is valid. The new rules on strikes are worded vaguely, which makes it easy to declare a strike illegal(Stoiciu 2016, pages 4­7). Should a court declare a strike illegal, the trade union has to pay damages and its leaders may be dismissed.³⁴ These regulations effectively thwarted strikes in Romania between 2011 and 2014 (Stoiciu 2016, 6/7). After sectoral relations were revisited in 2011, the coverage of collective bargaining declined from 100% in 2011 to 25% in 2015 (Stoiciu 2017, page 9), and the textile industry is now one of the industries that do not have representative unions(Stoiciu 2016, page 3/4); therefore, the textile industry does not have the opportunity to negotiate sectoral collective bargaining agreements. Prior to the legal changes in 2011, there was one successful CBA applied in the textile and garment industry, which had been signed in 2007.³⁵ It established the minimum wage payable in this industry (19% higher than the minimum salary paid in 2007), the overtime compen-sations, and the working conditions. The CBA was valid for 3 years and expired in 2010. Now, industry-level CBAs cannot be negotiated. “ While changes to the 2011 reform package appear to be critical, that would not solve the trade unions' structural problems“, including“the chronic strategic shortcomings and a legitimacy crisis“(Stoiciu 2016, page 1). Another impact of the 2011 legal reform is the replacement of unions by employee representatives in collective bargaining. Due to the high representativeness threshold, unions can hardly ever get engaged in collec­tive bargaining. The law allows employee representatives to negotiate under such circumstances. Field work con irms that trade unions have been largely replaced by employee represen­tatives: in the private sector, in 2015, 92% of the active collective agreements signed at company level were signed by employee representatives and not by trade unions. Before 2011, all CBAs had been concluded by unions(Stoiciu 2017, page 7). Field work revealed that attempts to get organised in order to challenge the inability to receive the minimum wage for the standard working hours had stopped mostly at the worker's level. ROMANIA 2018 9