ERODE: Urging the Erode Municipal Corporation to abandon plans to privatize solid waste management operations, over 500 sanitation workers boycotted their work and staged a sit-in protest at the corporation office on Monday. Every day, around 200 tonnes of garbage is collected from the corporation’s 60 wards and about 399 permanent workers and 1,127 daily-wage workers are engaged in solid waste management tasks.
Trade union office-bearers also participated in the protest.
S Chinnasamy, state general secretary of AITUC, said, "We have received information that the state government plans to privatize garbage collection and sanitation operations in 12 municipal corporations across Tamil Nadu, including Erode, Tiruppur and Coimbatore, under a public-private partnership (PPP) model.
As for the Erode corporation, there were around 500 permanent sanitary workers but their number has now dropped to around 399. Therefore, the majority of sanitary operations rely on daily-wage workers."
"They have only now, after a long struggle, received few rights, including ESI and PF. In this context, bringing them under the public-private partnership model would strip them of their rights. We are already urging the government to make daily-wage workers permanent.
The government's proposed move will further weaken the job security of daily-wage workers. Therefore, the government should abandon such acts," he added.
Erode Municipal Corporation Commissioner Arpit Jain and officials held talks with them and assured appropriate steps would be taken to address the demands of the workers. After the talks, the workers called off their protest.
A senior Erode corporation official said, "The TN Urban Infrastructure Financial Services Limited (TNUIFSL) has invited tenders to appoint consultancy firms to prepare detailed feasibility reports (DFRs) and provide transaction advisory services for the collection and transportation of municipal solid waste under the PPP model in 12 corporations across the state. It is routine for the government to examine a project from all angles before implementing it. Moreover, that tender is on a pilot basis.
However, due to a misunderstanding among the workers, they went on a strike. We explained the matter to them and they called off the protest."
"Door-to-door waste collection was affected by the workers' protest. However, the issue was not on a large scale," the official added.