Coal India today appears to have achieved significant “progress” towards entering into the five-year (2011-2016) wage pact with the labour unions. While details of the deal are not known, sources told Business Line that at a meeting in New Delhi on Monday both sides thrashed out the pending issues to arrive at a consensus.
Sources suggest that the decision on wage hike was arrived, just before the CIL board set out for a board meeting to discuss the possibility of tweaking the recently announced price list based on gross calorific value (gcv). The board meet which began at 4.30 p.m., was yet to be over till this evening.
Wage pact
Though company officials are tight-lipped on the development, industry sources said that CIL may enter in the wage pact (National Coal Wage Agreement –IX) on Tuesday. Incidentally, the present Chairman, Mr N.C. Jha, will retire on superannuation on January 31.
Earlier on January 27, joint bi-partite consultative committee (JBCC) on wage negotiation failed to arrive at a decision; reportedly due to fresh demands forwarded by the labour unions pushing the proposed wage hike way above the minimum guaranteed increase of 25 per cent. The meeting also failed to arrive at a conclusion on the next date of the JBCC meeting.
According to sources on January 27, the workers lobby came up with fresh demands to the extent of 10 per cent of basic pay, pushing the total hike to nearly 35 per cent over and above the existing salary and other benefits.
Fiscal impacts
It may be mentioned that the Rs 50,000-crore CIL was expecting a 12.5-per cent revenue impact through roll out of the GCV-based prices. This was expected to neutralise the Rs 5,500-6,000 crore annual increase in expenditure due to an estimated 25 per cent wage hike.