Dhanbad, May 18: A hostile greeting awaits Union coal secretary P.C. Parekh when he visits the coal capital tomorrow with five trade unions of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) crying out against the company?s outsourcing policy.
The unions are miffed with Parekh as he has not invited any labour representative for talks. The officer, during his visit to the Central Coalfields Limited (CCL) headquarters in Ranchi yesterday, had refused to meet any union.
Leaders of Intuc, Aituc, Citu, BMS and HMS met today and resolved to break in Dhanbad today to barge into BCCL?s Koyla Bhavan headquarters and register their protest. Parekh is scheduled to visit mines in Block 2, Areas 1 and 5 to review the progress of outsourcing implemented there.
The union leaders said it was ridiculous that the company had sub-let to contractors the mining operations in pits yielding premium coking coal when it claimed it had surplus staff.
?Outsourcing in the coking coal sector on a priority basis would spell doom for the company as it would leave almost 90,000 workers of BCCL redundant. The company is hatching a conspiracy to retrench 30,000 workers by declaring them surplus while the company is citing manpower shortage as the rationale behind introducing outsourcing,? said SK Bakshi, the general secretary of Citu.
The leaders also pointed out that no meeting of the BCCL?s Central Consultative Committee had been convened for five months though no decision regarding closures of mines could be taken without a discussion in the panel. ?But the management of the coal company is harassing workers by suggesting through the media that some mines would be closed soon,? said a labour union leader. The comptroller and auditor-general has recommended closure of 41 mines of BCCL six months ago as they had been incurring losses of Rs 2000-4000 per tonne of production.
Dhanbad MP Chandrasekhar Dubey, who is also the general secretary of Rashtiya Koyla Mazdoor Sangh affiliated to Intuc, has declared that he would press for a meeting with the coal secretary in his capacity as Lok Sabha member.
