By IANS,
Chennai : Two major unions of the Neyveli Lignite Corp Ltd (NLC) in Tamil Nadu have announced their decision to go on strike from Wednesday night after the failure of wage revision talks.
Around 2,000 police personnel have been deployed near the mines, power plant and the corporate office in a bid to prevent any violence.
The NLC management has told the state government the possibility of power disruption in the event of a strike.
The unions – linked to the PMK and the ruling DMK – represent a majority of the 14,000 permanent workers.
The bone of contention between the workers and the management is the effective date for the payment of increment to the workers.
“We want the increments – additional and service weightage increments – to be effective from Jan 1, 2007. The demand was earlier agreed by the company directors. Now the management wants to change the effective date to Sep 1, 2009,” a union leader told IANS from Neyveli over telephone.
An NLC official told IANS: “Increments and allowances are given only prospectively and not retrospectively.”
According to him, the company’s annual wage bill will go up by Rs.300 crore post the settlement which will be valid for five years.