Leaders hopeful of results in fifth round of tea talks

SNS, Siliguri, 28 July : The state labour department will convene a fifth tripartite meeting at Uttarkanya on 7 August to discuss tea workers’ wages in the Terai, Dooars and Darjeeling Hills after four such meetings earlier were inconclusive. Though the labour department had announced that the fifth meeting would be held on 25 July, the state decided to defer it due to technical reasons.

Joint labour commissioner Muhammad Rizwan said state labour minister Malay Ghatak will attend the talks at Uttarkanya.

Trade union leaders have already been informed about the date of the meeting and that discussions may stretch to the next day.

The leaders expect that the new labour minister, Mr Ghatak, will take positive steps to resolve the crisis after dialogue with the planters in the fifth meeting.

Notably, Mr Ghatak was also present in the fourth tripartite meeting at Uttarkanya and he had appealed to the planters’ apex body, Consultative Committee of Plantation Associations (CCPA), to rethink on the demands of the house and offer their proposal to continue dialogue, and this at a time when almost all the trade unions stood united, demanding the basic minimum wage structure, including the variable dearness allowance (VDA).

It may be noted that an internal feud among the Trinamul-backed trade unions came to the fore during the fourth meeting on 16 July. In the fourth talks, almost all trade union leaders, including the Left-backed ones, overwhelmingly supported senior Trinamul leader Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, as he had started arguing in favour of the basic minimum wages and VDA to take on the ruling party-backed INTTUC state president, Dola Sen, who had been strongly opposing the demands.

In the third tripartite meeting, planters had offered an increase of only Rs 21 for workers for three years with effect from 1 April this year.

The three-year tripartite agreement earlier expired on 31 March this year.

Workers in the Terai and the Dooars still get Rs 95 a day, following the last tripartite agreement, and workers in the Hills get Rs 90 a day following a bipartite agreement between the Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha and Tea Associations in Darjeeling Hills.

In a significant development, the trade unions (even the GJMM-backed plantation labour union) are almost united, except for the union led by Ms Sen, and they held a meeting in Darjeeling on 21 July and formulated strategies to demand the basic minimum wage structure and the VDA.