A member of Tata Workers’ Union at a meeting. Picture by Srinivas

Jamshedpur, Dec. 1: This new year, Tata Steel employees can hope for more concessions and fresh allowances.

The steel major management and Tata Workers’ Union today signed the much-awaited agreement on concession and allowances revision agreement on the company’s premises.

Speaking at a news meet at Tata Workers’ Union office this evening, the president of the recognised union Raghunath Pandey said most of the employees will benefit from the agreement that will revise the earlier leave travel concession (LTC) given to Tata Steel workers.

According to the new agreement, the LTC of employee has been fixed at Rs 14,000 and Rs 16,000 every two years. Employee with basic salary up to Rs 9,369 per month would now get Rs 14,000 every two years, while others would get Rs 16,000.

“Before the revision, employees were paid around Rs 8,000 and 10,000 as LTC every two years. Earlier, the LTC of employees were fixed according to years of service which the employees were against. This year, we have revised the system and tagged it with the basic salary of workers,” said Pandey.

He claimed that LTC revision was pending for the past eight to 10 months. The change in LTC would be come into effect from today.

Apart from LTC, the management and union has also decided to increase the transport allowance of all workers and supervisor-level employees.

This change would come into effect from February 1 this year which would increase their salary by Rs 100-150 per month.

“This has come as a good news for us as the transport allowance was last revised 15 months ago. It was tough to convince the management to increase the allowance as the petrol prices have come down and are likely to decrease further in coming months. However, we managed to revise it and it would benefit all workers and supervisor of the company,” said Pandey.

He said, in normal circumstances the transport allowance is increased every two years.

The union also signed the agreement for increasing other allowance, some of which were not revised in the past 18 years.

“Electricity bills and rent of staff quarters have been increased. But I do not think the increase in house rent would help much as the salary would only go up by Rs 60-150 per month,” said Pandey.

H.M. Nerurkar, the chief operating officer of Tata Steel, represented the manage- ment during the signing of agreement inside company’s premises.

After signing the agreement Pandey shared details of revisions to workers at Tata Workers’ premises at Bistupur.