Amaravati: APSRTC Employees’ Union has called for an indefinite state-wide strike from February 6 in Andhra Pradesh . The Union announced the same after a meeting with the Joint Action Committee (JAC) today and announce the call for the strike. The APSRTC Employees’ Union said that the state government and the management were not responding to their demands which had been pending for a long time, forcing them to take this step.

The Union said that citing financial crisis, RTC Vice-Chairman and Managing Director NV Surendra Babu had come up with a fitment formula of 20% against the demand of 50 %. They also asked for a tax holiday to be given to APSRTC.

Blaming the policies of the State government for losses incurred by the RTC, he said employees had no role to play in this. They said that despite a rise in diesel prices, the management had not revised the ticket fares to prevent passengers from facing inconvenience. The corporation earned a revenue of Rs 2,000 crore in 2018 and about 10,000 employees retired from their service.They also questioned the state government as to what they had done in the past four years to support the RTC and the employees

He added that the RTC employees were being paid 20 to 30 % less when compared to State government employees. In this scenario, the management should come up with measures to implement the new pay revision with effect from April 2017, they demanded.

The Union also asserted that they would organise a state-wide strike in the 13 districts and with the process of conducting talks with the management still on, the management is planning to reduce the number of employees in the RTC, much to the chagrin of the RTC employees.

The employees allege that the RTC management is taking unilateral decisions and trying to reduce the number of employees in the Security and Civil engineering departments, cutting subsidies in a bid to instigate the workers and not responding positively to the wage enhancement and other issues they said.

With the State government and the RTC management failing to heed to their demands, the Union has called for the state-wide strike they said. Union president YV Rao, Employees Union Pay Committee members M Hanumantha Rao, P Subramanyam Raju, Avula Prabhakar , G V Narasayya and other RTC employees participated in the discussions.

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