Oilmen Strike

Oilmen strike.The insider story the government wouldn’t want you to know.

(Because the media has been gagged, and press releases issued by the employee’s unions have been snuffed out)

This is not the first time PSUs have gone on strike.And probably not the last.

Every news source on TV, newspaper and internet tells you that employees of public sector companies have gone on strike. Nobody tells you why. Every explanation stops at “strike for higher pay”.

This is what you don’t know.

1. The recommendations of the latest pay commission have not yet been implemented by the petroleum secretary. Why??

• a. If the recommendations are implemented, the top tier employees (CMD downwards, 3-4 levels) of each of these companies will be drawing more than double the take home of the petroleum secretary, an IAS officer, and also to whom the CMDs of each of these PSUs report.
  
• b. It boils down to the ego of our country’s bureaucracy who can’t really digest the fact that the competent management of these companies will be draw more salaries than themselves.
  
• c. The M.J. Rao pay committee report recommendations were diluted and set for implementation, in a manner, which includes a lot of previously non – taxable components of the salary into the basic component now, which raises the tax liability of the employee and ultimately reduces his nett take home.
  
• d. Usually, if the employee’s salary is increased today, effective from 1st April 2008, he would receive arrear funds (unpaid salary for some 8 months); what has happening though in the current scenario, is that since the employees’ pay will be reduced, effective from an earlier date, the employees will be required to PAY BACK their employers an arrear (in some cases amounting to Rs 1 Lakh) on account of extra salary received.
  
• e. Every time employees have a grouse against the government, there is a set procedure in terms of communicating their displeasure. It mostly starts with written documents, with the names and signatures of the employee union heads going to the bureaucracy. Subsequently come small scale agitations and dharnas etc. A full scale strike is always a last resort. In the current scenario, the petroleum ministry was given an intimation, and ultimatum, way in advance of the date: 7th January 2009. The minister and the bureaucracy had ample time to respond to the pressing needs.
  

2. The petrol pumps across the country have gone dry due to:

• a. The employees of ONGC and other petroleum companies going on strike.
  
• b. The trucker’s strike which started 5 days prior to the PSU employees striking. And since all fuels are transported to the retail hubs via trucks, the gas stations were not receiving fresh supplies from 2nd-3rd January.
  
• c. Impending 2nd phase of price reductions of motor fuels: petrol pump owners had stopped taking fresh supplies at current rates because then they would have had to suffer losses (receiving supplies at rs 45 levels and then making the sale at rs 40). This phenomenon started after the petroleum minister’s announcement last week about reducing oil prices further.
  

3. The people heading these agitations are not low level blue collar workers. These are technocrats in senior and middle level management of these companies. They are not your usual government babus. These are highly qualified managers and engineers running energy companies with efficiency coefficients which rival the best in the world. 

They are not doing it because they want to hold the country to ransom, but because they want what is rightfully due to them.

4. A so far unsubstantiated discussion tells us that private players in the country’s energy sector may be fuelling the unrest through the bureaucracy so that disgruntled talent from our PSUs can be weaned away to run their companies. 

- A family member of a (as yet not striking) PSU Employee