Times
of India: Ahmedabad: Saturday, 11 April 2015.
The
debilitating civic strike was finally called off late on Thursday evening. More
than 16,000 striking municipal class-3 and class-4 employees will resume duty
on Friday. But for some mysterious reasons, the union the Ahmedabad Municipal
Corporation Servants Association (AMC-SA) which is not a recognized municipal
union, could place their 13 demands only on Friday, when the strike was being
called off. Normally, demands are placed before a strike call is given. The
reason cited for the strike has been the assault on an LG staff member by a
patient a few days ago, and the AMC's delay in lodging a criminal complaint.
The union's
president, Zahir Khan, and general secretary, Harish Makwana, have been dodging
specific queries on why the entire hospital staff as well as AMTS employees and
sanitary workers had launched the stir.
Over the past
two days, municipal transport properties worth Rs 25 lakh were damaged; 100
patients who were in a serious condition at VS and LG hospitals had to be moved
to Civil; and 145 emergency surgeries had to be postponed. Moreover, 5.15 lakh
people were hit by the unavailability of public transport and five zones of the
city had accumulated more than 7,000 tonnes of garbage. All for a strike call
given by a union which took three days to formulate their own demands!
Neither the
AMC officers nor the employees' union engaged in any negotiations. "The
authorities were taking time to lodge a criminal complaint against the
patient's family," said Makwana. But did the AMC lodge the complaint after
the strike? "No," Makwana told TOI. AMC sources said that Khan
required an office for the AMTS union on a huge parcel of land besides the Jamalpur
AMTS depot. An RTI filed by the Gujarat Mazdoor Sabha (GMS) revealed that the
AMC-SA was not a recognized AMC union.
"We
would have dragged the civic body to court had it allotted the Jamalpur land to
the AMC-SA," said a member of the GMS, Amrish Patel. "We wrote to
Guruprasad Mohapatra, the municipal commissioner at the time we pursued this,
that the land should be allotted to the GMS as we were not recognized either
but had more members than the AMC-SA." Patel went on to say: "Khan
and Makwana had approached us to seek support for the strike. But we refused
saying that it was unethical to hold a city to ransom over an administrative
matter." The two could not even produce a list of demands, Patel said.
"Right
now I remember five of the 13 demands that we submitted to the press and the
AMC commissioner," Khan said. "Some of them relate to pending
pensions of AMTS employees, jobs for the kin of former AMC employees, and a few
other demands."
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