Subrata Mukherjee

Calcutta, June 19: Trinamul trade union factionalism has forced the Durgapur Steel Plant (DSP) to write to the political leadership, a rare step by a public sector unit that echoes a frequent complaint heard in the sparse industrial clusters of Bengal.

Sources said the steel plant, a unit of SAIL, was compelled to write to Subrata Mukherjee, the national president of Trinamul’s labour arm INTTUC and minister, after a feud between two factions cast a cloud on a Rs 3,500-crore modernisation project.

The upgrade plan, aimed at increasing capacity and improving quality of the products, has become hostage to muscle-flexing by two unions, both claiming affiliation to Trinamul.

The unions — the newly set up DSP Thika (contract) Mazdoor Union headed by veteran labour leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay and the Durgapur Steel Plant Thika Sramik Congress headed by state INTTUC president Dola Sen — are allegedly forcing the authorities to employ their supporters as contract labourers.

Trinamul sources said the tug-of-war was the fallout of a tussle between Chattopadhyay, a former INTTUC national president, and Sen.

“The company recently sent a letter to Subrata Mukherjee, seeking his help,” a Trinamul source said, adding that a copy of the letter had been forwarded to industries minister Partha Chatterjee. “Subsequently, two senior DSP officials met Mukherjee at Writers.”

The DSP general manager in charge of personnel and administration, Kamakshi Raman, said a letter had been sent to the state administration. “It will not be proper for me to comment on this,” she said, declining to divulge the contents of the letter.

Government sources said the DSP had in the letter, sent about two weeks ago, explained in detail the problems it was facing at the plant.

DSP sources said the company was in the process of hiring over 2,200 workers on contract on a monthly salary of Rs 10,000-11,000 on average. “But both the unions want their nominees to be hired and the plant authorities don’t know what to do,” said a senior official with the company’s human resource department.

The problem of multiple factions had been cited earlier in Haldia. Although industrialists have apprised the government of the problem, it is not known if any company had formally written to a Trinamul leader on the issue before this.

Factionalism in factories had reared its head in the immediate aftermath of the Left exit from the government and the disintegration of the crony system it had put in place over decades. The developments in DSP suggest Trinamul has yet to bring order on the labour front.

Minister Mukherjee said the government was keenly observing the developments at DSP. He said the INTTUC had not granted affiliation to the DSP Thika Mazdoor Union, the one led by Chattopadhyay.

“But the DSP management should not have allowed the unions to handle job distribution among contract labourers,” Mukherjee said.

At DSP, the trouble between the two union units peaked on May 22. At a meeting of the DSP Thika Mazdoor Union, Chattopadhyay accused the Sen-headed union of making money by giving employment to contract labourers.

“The problem started when Dola refused to give INTTUC affiliation to our union which once belonged to (Congress trade union) INTUC with Subrata Mukherjee as its president,” Chattopadhayay said. Chattopadhyay said the Thika Mazdoor Union was much older than the one led by Sen.

Sen refused comment. “This is an internal matter of the INTTUC and I will not like to comment. But we do share the government’s vision of ensuring there is no logjam in any project anywhere,” she said.

But the modernisation project is already running behind schedule. “The feud is affecting work on two of the most crucial units being modernised — the bloom and round caster and the medium structural mill,” a DSP official said.

According to him, when a contractor was about to begin work on the mill, representatives of the two unions demanded that their people be engaged. “The gate passes of existing workers were taken away by the unions’ activists,” another source said.