The ‘Tool Down’ strike by the 3000-odd employees of Bosch’s Bangalore plant has intensified, with employees planning a hunger strike from 2nd October.

“The Gandhinagar Congress MLA, Mr Dinesh Gundu Rao, is here at the site to extend his support to us,” Mr Raghavendra, executive committee member of the Mico Employees Association (MEA), told Business Line.

The employees, since Thursday, have been fighting the auto parts maker’s decision to outsource certain functions carried out at the plant. The company has shut down certain operations and in response to it, the MEA has written a letter to the Labour Commissioner of Karnataka terming the company's action 'illegal', an MEA official said.

The MEA official said that the labour commissioner had told the association that he would issue a notice to the management.

According to Mr Raghavendra, the MEA has also mentioned in the letter that the company is illegally using trainees and women employees from the Bosch administrative department at the pump-housing department shop floor to

continue manufacturing processes. “We all used to manufacture about 3000 pumps a day, but the production has come down now because the people in the shop floor now produce just about 200 pumps a day,” he said.

The Labour Commissioner, the Bosch management and the MEA were to have a meeting to resolve the issue yesterday, but the company management didn’t appear for the meeting,” Mr Raghavendra said.

“They said that they had scheduled a video conference with their Germany office and couldn’t miss the meeting, since it was fixed six months back” Mr Gurudas Bhat , Additional Labour Commissioner told Business Line. “We have rescheduled the meeting for October 4th, and the status on the strike would remain unchanged till then,” he added. The Bosch officials refused to comment on the issue.

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