Chennai: A simmering discontent among various sections of government and public sector employees over the alleged refusal of the authorities to look into their demands seriously threaten to explode into a series of agitations that might disrupt normal life, if the ultimatum issued by the JACTTO-GEO on Monday and other developments with regard to protests by different unions were any indicators.
JACTTO-GEO, which is the abbreviation for Joint Action Council of Tamil Nadu Teachers Organisations and Government Employees Organisations, announced a siege of Fort St George on December 28 if the government failed to accede to their demand and did not take seriously the milder form of protests that would precede that final action involving lakhs of its members.
In a long letter addressed to Chief Minister M K Stalin, JACTTO-GEO State coordinators listed 10 ‘livelihood’ demands and wanted them to be immediately called for negotiations to settle the long pending issue.
They said they had 10 lakh teachers, government staff, employees and workers as members and that the government was duty bound to treat them with dignity if it wanted to create a progressive society,
While the government employees formed the bridge between the government and the masses taking the welfare schemes to the common people, the teachers played a vital role in creating an intellectual society and grooming future leaders for the State, nation and world in classrooms, the letter said.
They took a swipe at the government for privatizing many government jobs and said that no nation had ever seen economic prosperity through corporatization and privatization that had only endangered economic collapses, giving rise to large scale unemployment, hunger, deprivation and famine.
It said that if the government schemes were to not turn into namesake initiatives but instead taken up to the last beneficiary at the far end of the spectrum they should be implemented not with the help of the private sector, whose employees would have not have people’s welfare or social welfare in their mind, but government staff.
The JACTTO-GEO that had been placing its long charter of demands before the government for over 20 years had even attempted to organize protests to press for their demand after the DMK government took charge were persuaded to put off the agitation by the Chief Minister himself with a promise to look into it.
They had also invited Stalin, when he was in the opposition, to their conference in which their long-pending demands were voiced and he too had given an assurance that one of their demands to re-introduce the old pension scheme by discarding the new one would be implemented. Now that there has been an inordinate delay by the government in acceding to their demands after they had voted for the DMK, they want to go on the long-drawn protest.
The proposed protest would begin on November 1 at all district headquarters to draw the attention of the government to their demands and would be followed by a meeting of teachers, government employees and staff for a campaign on the protest between November 15 and 24.
After holding protests at all district headquarters on November 25, they would organize the siege of the Secretariat with lakhs of its members.
Employees of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board, too, would be holding agitations on November 2 pressing for their charters of demands that include salary revision, doing away with contract labour in the department and filling up of vacancies. The department has about one lakh employees in its rolls.
Meanwhile, on Monday, employees of the State Transport Corporations organized a protest demanding the acceding of their demands. The transport employees’ unions claim to have over a lakh members and if they were to go on a strike, it could disrupt electricity supply all through the State.
It may be recalled that some part-time government teachers and teaching job aspirants who had appeared for the qualifying examination called TET recently laid a siege of the DPI complex along with children and had to be removed forcefully by the authorities, drawing widespread criticism for their crackdown.
