Giving reprieve to the general people, the Uttaranchal Roadways Employees’ Union (UREU) has suspended its proposed indefinite strike that was to start from midnight of Monday. Alarmed by the call of an indefinite strike by the biggest union of roadways, the senior officials of the state roadways held a meeting with the top brass of the union on Monday and accepted the principal demands of the UREU. The union had been opposing the plan to introduce a new outsourcing agency in the roadways.
The managing director of Uttarakhand Roadways, V K Sant and other top officials of the roadways held a meeting with a delegation of UREU and assured them that the 2878 employees who were working with the outsourcing agency earlier would not be handed over to the new agency.
These employees who were mainly drivers and conductors were recruited by an outsourcing agency in 2005. This agency is alleged to have indulged in rampant corruption and duped the employees of their Provident Fund (PF) and Employee State Insurance (ESI). The contract of this agency was cancelled by the Transport department consequently.
UREU was insisting that since there is no outsourcing agency in the corporation from December 13, 2013 and these workers are working efficiently even after the contract of their parent agency was cancelled, the plan of the management to put them under a new outsourcing agency is not acceptable.
Apart from accepting the major demand of the union, the management of roadways also assured that their other demands like increase in allowances and fair probe in the cases of disciplinary action would also be soon looked into.
Seemingly satisfied by the assurances of the management, the UREU suspended its plans to go on an indefinite strike. The meeting was attended by MD of roadways V K Sant, general manager (GM) Personnel Ashish Kumar, GM (Operations) Deepak Jain, AGM (legal) Pradeep Sati and AGM (finance) Bhupendra Kumar. The union was represented by its patron D N Shukla, president H R Bahuguna, vice- president Sahadev Singh and general secretary Ashok Kumar Choudhary.
The general secretary of UREU, A K Choudhary told The Pioneer that the union is satisfied by the stance of the management. Hence, its decision to susped the indefinite strike, he added. The union had been on war path on the issue and had staged a 24- hour strike on November 5 due to which the commuters had faced hardships.