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BUSINESS:
EXIT SCHEME
Till
VSS Do Us Part
By Sumit
Mitra
In winning the battle of nerves against the Hindustan Vegetable Oils
Corporation workers, the Government has found a chink in the unions' armour
When
the Government locks eyeballs with workers of the public-sector undertakings
neither blinks. It made PSU jobs permanent and their costs irremediably
high. For the first time, however, the army of workers and managers of
a major PSU, with its branches spread all over the country, has thrown
in the towel in a battle of wits with the Government.
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| VEGETATING:
HVOC employees' show of solidarity a day before their mass exit |
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On February
7, the date of expiry of the 90-day Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS)
offered by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, all except a dozen of the
1,375 workers and officers of Hindustan Vegetable Oils Corporation Limited
(HVOC) signed the requisite forms for quitting. For those few who stayed
back, the attraction was not the failed PSU but the possibility, however
remote, of an obscure arm of the company, to make breakfast food, to be
revived, and to accommodate them. It was the biggest surrender of a PSU
workforce in recent times, showing the way perhaps of the future course
of events. Significantly, it came in the wake of over 40,000 employees
of nationalised banks recently accepting the golden handshake.
Till the
day before the workers' surrender, morale seemed high in the edible oil
packaging and refining company's headquarters at Delhi's Kirti Nagar Industrial
Area as well as in the nine units spread as far out as Amritsar, Kolkata
and Chennai. On that day, Madan Lal, president of the INTUC-affiliated
HVOC Employees' Union, forcefully declared that "nobody will touch
the VSS until wages are revised".
Within 24
hours there were long queues at every unit with employees signing their
jobs away, however regretfully, for an average compensation package of
a little over Rs 2 lakh. This, despite the fact that HVOC wages were not
revised after 1992. The employees had been given the option to choose
between 45 days' salary for each completed year in service and 35 days'
salary for each completed year plus 25 days' salary for each year till
retirement-the latter being known as the Gujarat model.
Why did
the HVOC employees give in at the last moment? Union Food and Consumer
Affairs Minister Shanta Kumar says, ''It is the Gujarat model that worked.
After underwriting huge losses on account of unviable PSUs, we decided
to make the VSS really attractive.'' The minister's explanation is partially
correct. With 80 per cent of HVOC employees in the 40-45 age group, the
compensation offered in the Gujarat model based inter alia on the years
ahead in service surely had an appeal. But that does not explain why the
employees dithered till the last day.
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