Grave injustice meted out to municipal staff: CITU

Vijayawada (NTR District): The State government has been doing gross injustice to the municipal corporation workers and

employees, criticised CPM State executive member and CITU leader Ch Babu Rao while addressing the golden jubilee celebrations of Vijayawada Municipal Corporation Workers and Employees Union affiliated to the CITU here on Thursday.

CITU leaders K Umamaheswara Rao, Donepudi Kasinath, N Ch Srinivas, Boyi Satyababu David and others participated in the meeting.

Addressing the huge gathering, the CITU leaders said that the municipal workers, who have been cleaning towns and cities making life easy for the citizens, have remained in deep distress. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, who promised to make contract workers as permanent employees, cheated them, they alleged.

"The YSRCP is more interested in winning the next elections to continue in power for the next 30 years than making the workers permanent employees. The prices of essential commodities, cooking gas, transport charges and power tariff had gone up but not the salaries of the workers," the leaders criticised.

Babu Rao recalled that the municipal workers were praised as warriors, but their welfare was totally forgotten. 'The government has been doing injustice to the families of workers, who died while on duty. The women workers are not even provided toilets though they claim day in and day out about Swatch Bharat,' he pointed out.

He criticised that the advisors and the people's representatives are being paid several lakhs of rupees as salaries, but the contract employees were not even given pensions. Babu Rao exhorted the municipal employees to raise their voice against injustice.

The conference demanded the government to make all the municipal workers permanent employees, salaries of all categories should be enhanced, accident insurance for Rs 25 lakh should be provided to all workers, the welfare schemes should be made applicable to all, housing facilities should be provided to the workers, weekly-offs should be provided to the municipal workers.