The Patna Municipal Corporation headquarters. Telegraph picture

Patna, May 30: Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) Employees’ Union has announced that all members under its banner would go on a three-day strike from June 16.

This comes only two days after Grade-IV employees of the PMC resumed duties ending a five-day strike.

The strike would bring civic works to a complete standstill yet again.

The union has been pressing for regular salaries, assured career promotion benefits for many employees and a 10 per cent increment in dearness allowance (DA) among other demands.

According to sources, over 3,000 employees are expected to abstain from work during the strike.

“Prior to the strike, we will carry out demonstrations outside the PMC headquarters from June 7 to June 13,” said a member of the union.

As monsoon is expected to hit the capital around June 10, the strike could mean trouble, said a senior PMC official. Earlier this month, senior administrative officials in the civic agency had turned down the proposal to approve a 10 per cent hike in DA saying the civic body did not have enough funds to bear the additional burden.

Senior officials said the corporation collects only about Rs 40 crore annually from various sources of revenue while it pays about Rs 48 crore per annum to the employees in salaries alone. There are about 3,000 employees in the corporation on master rolls while about 1,000 others work, mostly in the cleaning cadre, on a contractual basis.

Officials in the PMC said the corporation earns about Rs 25 crore in holding taxes, Rs 5 crore in stamp duty and Rs 10 crore through water taxes and other taxes while employees are being paid around Rs 4 crore a month. “The income of PMC is not sufficient to take care of the expenditure in the salary head, therefore, it is difficult at this stage to go ahead with the proposed DA. Even salaries are not regular because of this reason,” said a senior PMC official.

Last week, about 2,500 cleaning cadre employees of the PMC had called for an indefinite strike, which was called off five days later.

The agitating employees had 26-point demands, which include assured career promotion benefits, regularisation of daily wagers, increase in DA, regular salaries, maternity leave and clearance of outstanding dues. In March, around 3,500 employees of PMC and the water supply wing had gone on strike demanding outstanding salaries but had resumed work three days later after the intervention of senior officials of the state urban development department.