THE public transport workers numbering about 1,50,000 working in Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporations (TNSTC) across the state are on war path since January 4 in protest against the adamant attitude of the state government in meeting their genuine demands, which are as follows:

1)    To make the pay and allowance equal to the drivers of the state government and other local bodies in the state. Currently the workers are getting Rs 700 less at the basic stage.

THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions, in a statement issued on January 10, has denounced the government’s move in registering FIR against the journalist of Tribune, Rachna Khaira and her sources for exposing the leakage-prone systemic fault in Aadhar administration. In fact the journalist should have been rewarded for successfully investigating the faults in the UIDAI system in respect of protecting individual data for preventing intrusion on peoples’ right to privacy, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court also.  

“The bouncers pushed me back into my chair and held me by my shoulders till I signed the document. It was an awful experience and I can't begin to tell you how demeaning it was. It was not like I was on the bench. I was performing and they treated me in this terrible manner”, states an employee of VDSI who signed on the dotted line.

THE Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI), in its office bearers meeting held on December 17, 2017 at Chennai decided to launch a series of struggle programmes to defeat the draconian anti-people FRDI bill and to protect the interests of the depositors.

BEFI has called upon all its state units to collect crores of signatures from the public as part of the campaign launched by the United Forum of Bank Unions to be submitted to the speaker of the Lok Sabha in the budget session of the parliament.

CITU general secretary and parliamentarian Tapan Sen has written to Union Labour and Employment Minister Santosh Gangwar, seeking his intervention to stop the proposed reorganisation of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) through merger of sub-regional offices in different states.

 In a letter on November 30, Sen said that such a move would lead to “immense and unmanageable difficulties for insured persons to have their lawful benefit denied by lower-level offices/establishments”.