Chennai: The general secretary of the All India Bank Employees’ Association, CH Venkatachalam, said bank and insurance sector employees would boycott work on January 8 and 9 to highlight various demands.
Speaking to reporters in Chennai on Sunday, Venkatachalam said the Centre must strengthen the public sector banks and halt privatisation of the public sector banks. He also opposed the merger of banks as it would not be beneficial to the banks and the people.
He said the Centre must take effective measures to not weaken the public
distribution system and ban speculative trade in commodity market. He demanded that the Centre takes effective measures to create jobs for youth and sought strict enforcement of labour laws, social security cover for the workers,
implementation of a minimum wage of not less than Rs 18,000, assured pension for all workers and switch over from NPS to assured pension scheme.
While urging the Centre to stop disinvestment in central and State public
sector undertakings, Venkatachalam demanded that the government
implement equal pay and benefit for all the contact workers as that of regular workers and employees. He said the AIBEA is opposed to the proposed adverse amendment to labour laws and to halt indiscriminate FDI in defence, insurance, railways and other core sectors.
He also demanded that the Centre strengthen the public sector banks and halt
privatisation of the public sector banks and merger of banks. He also urged the
government to recover huge corporate bad loans and demanded halt in
outsourcing of regular bank jobs, Elaborating further about privatisation of public
sector banks, he said the Centre wants to privatise the public sector banks which have deposits of Rs 118 lakh crore belonging to the people. After mergers of six banks with SBI in April 2017, a total of 6,950 branches had been closed in one year. Such mergers lead to closure of a large number of branches. The banks have bad loans of a whopping Rs 13 lakh crore. He also demanded that the government to fill 2 lakh vacancies immediately.
