The Hindu : Business : CITU disowns Great Eastern Hotel staff stir

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 15, 2005

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Business

CITU disowns Great Eastern Hotel staff stir

Indrani Dutta

West Bengal Government unwilling to extend deadline for ERS beyond April 18

GUESTS IN UNIFORM?: Police guard the gates of Great Eastern Hotel while trade union activists and hotel worker protest in front of the hotel to protest against its privatisation on Thursday. — Photo: Parth Sanyal

KOLKATA: Time seems to be ticking away for the country's oldest hotel — Great Eastern Hotel (GEH) — with the West Bengal Government weighing options on its future and the State CITU distancing itself from the resistance being put up by its members to block the Government's restructuring efforts.

Although the stalemate in the privatisation move has been broken, there are few signs yet that the trickle of response to the ERS (Early Retirement Scheme), offered by the government, would turn into a deluge.

The Government is unwilling to extend the deadline for the ERS beyond April 18. It reopened the ERS last week, offering an alternative location for submitting application forms.

There is a quiet but palpable tension in the area around the hotel. A posse of policemen fanned out to `guard' the vantage points around GEH, located in the central business district and flanked by the Governor's residence to its left and the State secretariat to a distant right. The policemen had lined up in anticipation of a procession arranged by a union affiliated to Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress.

Talking to The Hindu, Atiar Rahman of the INTUC-affiliated union said more than the privatisation efforts, the union found the unacceptable attitude of the Government of presenting the case as a `fait accompli' before the unions. Mr. Rahman's majority union wants to be consulted. The CITU union at the hotel has adopted a fence sitting posture although it is opposing the privatisation in principle. Shyamal Chakraborty, president of the West Bengal unit of CITU said it would not actively oppose the effort towards restructuring the hotel, just as it had not opposed the Government's efforts to restructure 28 other state-owned units.

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