The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Study home-based industry workers' plight: CITU

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 23, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Study home-based industry workers' plight: CITU

Staff Reporter

``Shed hire-and-fire attitude''

TAMBARAM : Successive Governments have done little to address the problems of unorganised workers in Tamil Nadu, leaders of the Centre for Indian Trade Unions said, urging the State Government to set up a committee to study the living conditions of workers in home-based industries.

A. Soundararajan, State secretary of the CITU, speaking at a meeting after inaugurating an office of the Auto and Taxi Drivers Wing of the trade union at Tambaram on Sunday, said the committee should go into the categories of workers in these home-based industries, and fix minimum wages for them.

Workers in home-based industries included domestic servants who were not covered by any welfare measures. Several organisations claiming to represent problems of unorganised workers were springing up but they only exploited their ignorance, the CITU leader said.

"Workers, even in the organised sector, including Special Economic Zones and industrial estates, are not paid their basic minimum wages and one can understand the plight of unorganised workers," Mr. Soundararajan said.

R. Nandagopal, secretary, South Chennai district of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), regretted that foreign and even large Indian companies did not abide by rules meant for safeguarding their workers. He said the corporate sector should shed their "hire-and-fire" attitude and evolve worker-friendly policies.

Mr. Nandagopal said that the CITU office in Tambaram was intended to serve as a centre where workers from the unorganised sector could get to know their rights.

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