Leaders of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation Employees Unions’ United Front on Friday said they would stop operating buses immediately after they receive a directive from the PRC Sadhana Samithi.
Speaking after a roundtable to discuss their course of action with regard to the ongoing employees’ protest on the PRC issue, the RTC union leaders said they had welcomed their merger in the government with the hope that their longstanding demand forreinstatement of the old pension scheme would be heeded. “However, aside from keeping it in abeyance, certain new policies of the management forcedus to adopt the path of confrontation,” they said.
They said the employees were deprived of the Staff Retirement Benefit Scheme (SRBS) and many other benefits in phases. They said a strong wave of resentment had been brewing among the employees against the management due to its ‘unilateral’ decisions involving their welfare.
Their hope that the benefits of the PRC would be extended to them as they were now government employees, had also been dashed. Because of the PRC being declared by the government, the RTC employees,under the PublicTransport Department (PTD),would be deprived of two PRCs (2021 and 2025), they said.
State conveners of the United Front Y. Srinivasa Rao and Parisetty Damodar Rao pointed to the difference between the salaries of the RTC employees and other government employees. “We have no clue as to how the management intends tobridge this gap. We also have no idea about what scales are being implemented for us as PTD employees as we have been kept in the dark,” they said.
They said the injustice being meted out to the RTC employees even after their merger in the government should be addressed immediately. If their demands were not met, they would not hesitate to join the protests being staged by the PRC Sadhana Samithi, they warned.
