The Hindu Business Line : Tea garden unions move SC on payment of dues

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Tea garden unions move SC on payment of dues

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Kolkata June 4 Five unions of tea garden workers in several States have joined hands with IUF, the international union of food and plantation workers, and filed a PIL in Supreme Court demanding, among other things, immediate payment of statutory dues to those employed in various tea gardens either sick, closed or mismanaged.

The five unions are Paschim Bangla Khet Mazdoor Union, Estate Staff Union of South India, Nilgiris District Estate Workers Union, Kerala Plantation Working Class Union and Indian National Plantation Workers' Federation. Several State Governments, two employers' associations, namely, ITA and Upasi, and Tea Board, among others, have been respondents. The case is to come up for hearing in July.

This was stated at a press conference addressed here by Ms Sue Longley of IUF and her two Indian coordinators, Ms Sujata Gothoskar and Ms Anuradha Talwar.

While they could not estimate exactly the amount of statutory dues, they quoted from a study to say that till September 2005, statutory dues in 22 closed gardens in West Bengal alone were more than Rs 300 crore. The figure at the all-India level therefore would be staggering.

The crisis facing the tea garden workers has come up for a review during the three-day conference currently being held here under the aegis of IUF. More than 40 representatives of various unions of tea workers from six States, namely, West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Tripura are attending the conference.

The IUF office-bearers felt that workers of the closed gardens should be encouraged to form co-operatives and run them. Experiments in this regard had proved to be successful in Tripura. The operation management committees (OMCs) running many gardens in the northern part of West Bengal was not necessarily the answer to the present crisis as not all the OMCs were running well. More important, these committees did not function under any regulatory framework.

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