People's Democracy

United Movement Of Workers-Employees

Must Be Developed Further

A PACKED convention was held of late in Kolkata on the menace of outsourcing, ‘surplus,’ surrender, and downsizing of workers and employees.  The Eastern Railwaymen’s Union organised the convention.  Describing the problems as all-India in character, CITU general secretary Chittabrata Majumdar said that the attacks were accompanied by an attempt to take away those regulations that would look to the interests of workers-employees.

The magnitude of the attack calls for a bigger and more organised united movement across the country.  The situation, opined Chittabrata Majumdar, was also to be explained before the mass of the people to make them aware of the nature of anti-worker and anti-employee outlook of the UPA government.

Chittabrata Majumdar said that the principal thrust of the Congress-run UPA government was the privatisation of the production sector and the service sector.  The state sector, the basis of the nation’s self-reliant economy, was the first to feel the brunt of the privatisation onslaught. The union government appears bent upon handing over to foreign private management state-sector as well indigenous private-sector banking institutions. 

Plan is also afoot to first corporatise the different divisions of the Indian Railways and then to privatise the sector.  In the circumstances, said the CITU leader, the Railway workers-employees must go in for a massive united movement.  If the workers-employees of such core sectors as Railways, bank, coal, and power forge a united struggle, immense pressure could be created on the union government especially if the mass of the people were made to get involved in the movement.

Pointing to the very slow pace of Railway line extension in post-independent India, Bengal CITU president Shyamal Chakraborty said that compared to the pre-independence figure, the growth since remained very sluggish in the last 60 years. Yet, expansion of Railways would mean more employment generation and an improvement of both [passenger travel and the carriage of goods.

Calling for the immediate implementation of a plan for expansion of Railway lines in Bengal, Shyamal Chakraborty also drew the attention of the convention to the need for Railway track extension in the north-eastern states, a long overdue demand.  The speaker assured the assemblage that the Railway-related demands would be included in the charter of demands of the National Platform of Mass Organisations or NPMO.

CPI(M) MP Basudeb Acharya said that the number of Railway employees countrywide had been reduced from 20 lakh to 14 lakh.  The Railways earned profits and it was the Railway employees who sweated it out to help the Railway become a profitable entity.  The attempt to break apart the Railway industry, in fact, has been going on from 1991 when the first whiff of imperialist globalisation was allowed to waft through the national economy.  The Railway ministry has also declared that it would not accept as a plan for any urban Railway communications.

The railway ministry, said the CPI(M) leader, was interested greatly in privatising the goods carrying sector.  In the circumstances, the CPI(M) and Left MPs have become vocal against these moves in the Parliament and the railway worker-employees must engage themselves in bigger movements across the country in the days to come.

Other speakers were ERMU’s general secretary Nilmoni Das, all-India Railway employees’ leader Rakhal Dasgupta, and representatives of AITUC and HMS.

(B P)