BUCHAREST — Romania will repay its PISA 2025 education deficit by placing every citizen born between 2007 and 2020 on permanent overtime, the Ministry of Labor announced Tuesday, converting the shortfall in reading, mathematics and science into a fixed number of compulsory extra working hours.
The scheme, called the Generational Overtime Levy, requires each member of the affected cohort to work an additional four hours and twenty minutes every day until the debt is cleared. The Ministry has calculated that the deficit equals roughly nine hundred million hours of instruction, which it will recover through unpaid labor rather than classroom time.
«We considered improving schools, but the math was simpler this way,» said State Secretary for Fiscal Discipline Radu Munteanu. «Every hour a young Romanian spends filing, stacking or sorting is an hour the nation no longer owes to the future. We are not punishing anyone. We are amortizing them.»
Employers across the country have begun installing extra shifts. Bucharest supermarkets now stay open until 3 a.m. so that teenage cashiers can cover the gap. Construction sites in Cluj have added a night crew composed entirely of recent graduates, who receive a hot meal and a stamped card confirming their contribution to the national balance.
The Ministry has also introduced a Generational Debt Clock in Unirii Square, which counts down the remaining hours in real time. Officials say the clock will run for approximately thirty-one years, or until the cohort has repaid what the country failed to teach it.