Bengal IT employees apply for trade union registration

Kolkata, June 22 (IANS) The Kolkata Forum for IT Employees on Saturday said it has applied to the West Bengal government for trade union registration in the Information Technology and ITes, Business Process Outsourcing and Knowledge Process Outsourcing industry in the state.

"We have applied for the registration last week and are hopeful to get it soon. We have seven office bearers including a President, General Secretary and Treasurer and others and 13 general members. About 180 members have already been registered with the forum and we approached 5,000 employees," Forum's President Santanu Bhattacharya said.

He said plan to register as a trade union in West Bengal has been "triggered and accelerated" by number of incidents of "unfair labour practices towards employees where they do not have many options to resist such unfortunate incidents in their personal capacity".

According to the forum, there are trade unions in the IT sector in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and West Bengal would be the fourth state with a IT sector trade union, if it secures the registration.

There are 1.8 lakh employees working in the IT industry in the state, Bhattacharya said, adding that the forum, which started its journey back in December 2014, had tried to guide the employees in different companies in the process of filing dispute at the Labour Commission and later in their legal fights without having a formal registration.

The forum's General Secretary Rajarshi Dawn alleged that what is striking is that out of the various heads for cost-cutting, companies choose labour as the primary and mostly the only head to reduce operating costs.