Municipal contract workers stayed away from work for the second day on Tuesday demanding that the GO 279 be scrapped, as it provided for terminating the services of DWCRA groups in the local bodies and hand over sanitation contracts to private players.
Garbage piled up in different parts of the city as the workers confronted the 100-odd private workers deployed to remove waste collected from the houses.
The agitating workers, led by CITU-affiliated A.P. Municipal Workers’ Union city working secretary S. Srinivasa Rao, came in a procession from the Municipal Corporation office to the busy Church Centre, and formed a human chain to press for their demands that also included equal pay for equal work as directed by the Supreme Court, regularisation of their services, and payment of all allowances due to the regular sanitary workers.
“We will intensify the agitation if the government remains indifferent to our demands,” said CITU Prakasam district secretary Ch. Srinivasa Rao. He accused the government of going on a privatisation spree, making the lives of the sanitary workers, a majority of them Dalits and tribals, miserable.
