KOCHI: The frayed relations between the CPI(M) and the CPI seem to have percolated to the trade union level going by the recent strike at the Indian Oil Corporation’s bottling plant at Udayamperoor.
While the CITU-affiliated Kerala Petroleum Gas Workers Union (KPGWU) aligned with the trade union outfits of the INTUC and the BMC and formed a joint action council to strike work demanding that the oil major deploy an ambulance at the plant, the AITUC-affiliated IOC Contract and Casual Workers Union was not part of the united front.
The strike followed an incident in which a worker, who suffered burns while engaged in maintenance duty at the plant, had to be rushed to the hospital on a motorbike in the absence of an emergency vehicle.
In fact, the CITU claimed that the AITUC was not even part of the strike, and that its members were willing to work risking safety even without deployment of ambulance by the oil company. “We stopped workers affiliated to the AITUC when they turned up for work when the strike was on. They were neither signatories to the joint memorandum submitted to the management and the District Collector nor did they join trade union representatives who held talks with the Collector,” said T.K. Prasad, secretary of KPGWU.
However, the AITUC denied the charges, maintaining that though it had chosen not to be part of the indefinite strike by the joint front of other unions, they were indeed on strike on their own.
“We had demanded an inquiry into safety failures at the plant, which the company had obliged. We also sought the beefing up of safety measures and called for the deployment of a temporary emergency vehicle with services of drivers round the clock till the deployment of an ambulance for which the company management had asked up to six months,” said T. Raghuvaran, general secretary of the AITUC.
However, the AITUC leadership was kept in the dark about the second round of meeting on Wednesday in which the strike was eventually called off.
