HAL employees ready for strike while management tries to avert

Bengaluru: While as many as 20,000 employees of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) have called for an indefinite strike from Monday, the management issued a statement saying it was making efforts to avert the strike at all its 9 locations across the country over wage revision retrospectively since January 1, 2017.

"As talks and reconciliation efforts with the management failed on our demands, especially wage revision, we are going ahead with the indefinite strike from Monday as per the notice we served a fortnight ago (September 30) in compliance with the labour laws," HAL's 9 trade unions' general secretary S. Chandrasekhar said.

The 55-year-old aerospace major has about 20,000 employees in 5 production complexes in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Koraput in Odisha, Lucknow and Nashik in Maharashtra and 4 research and development (R&D) centres across the country.

To defuse the situation, the company offered to enhance allowances under cafeteria system at 22 per cent for workmen in scale 1 to 10-20 per cent for workmen in special scale as against the uniform rate of 19 percent offered earlier.

"We apprised the unions of the ill-effects of resorting to strike, jeopardising the interest of the employees and the organization," said the company in the statement. 

The management also offered to revised rate of fitment benefit at 11 per cent.

The wage revision is due from January 1, 2017 as the previous two revisions were in 2012 and 2007 for 5 years. Revision of executives' salaries was also due since the same date (January 1, 2017) and implemented in November 2017 as per the directive of the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE).