About 20,000 employees of the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, have launched an indefinite strike across the nation, in all its nine locations. They are demanding wage revision retrospectively, with effect from January, 2017, among other things.
The employees’ wages are due to be revised from 1 January, 2017. The earlier revisions took place in 2012 and 2007 for five years. The salaries of the executives are also due for revision, with effect from 1 January, 2017. They were last implemented in November 2017 according to the directive of the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE).
The staff in HAL’s five production complexes and four research and development centres in the country had served a notice about two weeks back, before calling the strike, in accordance with the requirements of labour laws.
The aerospace organisation has a workforce of 20,000 across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Koraput in Odisha, Lucknow and Nashik in Maharashtra.
The workers have been forced to strike because they felt the management wasn’t giving them a hearing.
The management not only tried to explain the adverse effects of the strike to the employees, but also attempted to deter them by offering enhanced allowances as per the cafeteria system — 22 per cent for workmen in the scale 1, to 10-20 per cent for workmen in special scale. The uniform rate of only 19 per cent was being applied earlier.
The management also offered to revise the rate of fitment benefit at 11 per cent.
