AIPF was part of this fact finding on the unlawful termination of workers at Ms. ITI Ltd., Bengaluru. PDF versions of the Report in English and Kannada below.
On December 1, 2021, 80 workers of India’s first Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) in the country, M/s Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Ltd. at Bengaluru, were retrenched, despite having worked for between 3 to 35 years for the sole reason that they formed a Union and demanded their rights. After the lockdown in 2020, the workers came together to form the Karnataka General Labour Union (KGLU), affiliated with the All-India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), Karnataka.
M/s ITI Ltd. falls under the Department of Telecommunication, Ministry of Communication, Government of India and is working on several crucial sensitive and defence related projects. Despite long years of service, the workers are guised as “contract workers” and denied basic rights. Of the 80 workers who still haven’t been reinstated, 38 workers, or nearly half, are from Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) backgrounds and a large number are women. In the labour conciliations, the Regional Labour Commissioner has instructed the management of ITI Ltd. to give jobs back to the workers. However, they have failed to comply with the same since the management cannot digest the fact that the workers have organised themselves and availed legal recourse for their regularization and humane working conditions. The workers hence have been protesting at the gates of ITI Ltd. demanding that they be given their jobs back.
Once we learned about the developments, some of us, as civil society members, came together to prepare a fact-finding report on the ongoing stalemate between the workers of ITI and the management. The workers have been sitting outside the factory gates for over 60 days and have now started a hunger fast. The management, however, has refused to engage with the workers. Even when some of us tried to meet with the management, we did not succeed in securing a meeting with them.
In this report, we present our findings. We observe that the ITI management has engaged in illegal and unethical actions concerning the intimidation and termination of contract workers. That a significant number of them are from marginalized castes and socioeconomic backgrounds points to the violation of social welfare and principles of equity and justice by ITI. The Social Welfare Department has also warned against the ongoing practice of manual scavenging on ITI’s campus, also performed by contract workers. Through contract work, increasingly deployed by public sector companies for core tasks – such as, in the case of ITI, defence and telecommunications process engineering – worker rights are steadily eroded and workers are discouraged from unionising and collectivising. As Bengaluru-based labour and human rights lawyer, Maitreyi Krishnan, has warned, “the Supreme Court has called the contract worker system as nothing but a form of bonded labour and a subterfuge to deny workers their rights. Despite the same, we see public sector enterprises employing a large number of people through such exploitative systems.” A number of disputes and legal cases have been filed against ITI to no avail. This fact-finding report aims to document the range of ITI’s abuses and the workers’ struggle through the voices of workers themselves as well as through contractual, legal, and union documentation.
Hence, we demand from the management that the workers should be taken back immediately. We also demand from the Labour Ministry that penal action should be initiated against the management for repeatedly refusing to abide by the instructions of the Regional Labour Commissioner. To the citizens, we appeal that they stand with the workers. Under conditions of increasing precarity of livelihoods and contractualisation of labour across sectors, the ITI workers’ struggle is not theirs alone. It is ours too.
