Tripartite meeting over tea garden wage raise issue

EOI, Jalpaiguri, 10 Nov 2014: Demanding an immediate end to the festering demand for increasing the wages of tea garden workers, several unions on Monday staged strikes across north Bengal that is to continue till Wednesday. 

The unions want to pressurise the state government into sitting down at the negotiation table and resolving the issue. The Centre-backed Committee of Tripartite Meeting for Tea Plantation Workers (CTMTPW) proposed a tripartite meeting between the workers’ unions, the state government and garden owners. The meeting is expected to be held on November 12 and will see the presence of tea garden owners from Assam, Tripura and south India as well.

Notably, the last six tripartite meetings called by the state government failed to reach any conclusion. However, with the intervention of the CTMTPW chaired by Union industry minister Nirmala Sitaram, a satisfactory deal appears on the cards. CTMTPW state committee member Jiyaull Alam said the central committee had earlier fixed the wage increase for a three-year period. However, with the expiry of the time-frame and the repeated failure of the tripartite meetings as well as the state government’s negligence to the issue, the committee decided to intervene. Alam said the meeting called in Delhi on November 12 will put pressure on the state government to resolve the issue at the earliest.