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G. Gurumurthy

Coimbatore , Oct. 20

THE hopes of securing an incentive scheme as an alternative to bonus to those who are not eligible for bonus as per the Act have been dashed for the textile workers in the fund-starved National Textile Corporation (NTC) owned textile mills in Tamil Nadu.

The workers have resorted to an indefinite strike in five of the six city based NTC units since Sunday.

According to sources close to the umbrella trade union forum, the joint action committee of the eight major workers unions which gave the strike call, the NTC's holding company officials, during one of the agitations by the NTC workers in July last, had offered to workout a productivity-linked incentive scheme as prevailed in other public sector enterprises. The NTC administration subsequently, it is said, commissioned a study by the Chennai Productivity Council to assess the workers' productivity levels. The study into the five years' of performance found that in most cases, the physical parameters analysed in respective of workers productivity in their units did not favour awarding any incentive. So the move to consider productivity-linked incentive was finally rejected by the board of the NTC's holding company, the sources said.

The issue of payment of bonus for the NTC workers in Tamil Nadu, unlike that of their counterparts in the private textile units in the State, which generally ignore the salary/eligibility ceilings for bonus computation, has been a bone of contention in the past four years as the NTC administration gave only a recoverable cash advance (in lieu of bonus during Diwali). But the workers' unions began to put up resistance to the recoveries of the advanced being done at the time of settlement of workers dues from their terminal benefits.

This time also when the management offered to give cash advances, the NTC workers and their unions decided not to accept any cash advance and demanded that all the workers should be given either bonus or non-recoverable cash advance as incentive. When the NTC administration refused to accept this, the unions went ahead with its strike decision.

Meanwhile, following the strike, a conciliatory meeting between the NTC workers and the management has been convened by the State Labour Department at the Office of the Assistance Commissioner of Labour in the city to sort out the issue.

It is said that while the work in five NTC units in the city is disrupted by the strike, the five other NTC units functioning under the TN subsidiary including the two in the Pondicherry remained so far unaffected as the workers in these units attended to work, the sources said.

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