Since 1st June, more than 2,500 National Textiles Corporation (NTC) employees in Mumbai have been on strike in protest of the eight-month pay delay. The employees, including those at NTC’s offices and mills, who are suffering to maintain their families and are unable to pay their bills or buy groceries on time, claimed that they have not been provided with medical benefits and that gratuities have been withheld since 2020.
According to a representative of the NTC Employees Welfare Forum, this is the situation for all 12,000 NTC employees nationwide. In the city, NTC employs about 750 people in its offices; the remaining are mill workers.
One of the employees said that nobody has received their back pay, not even the officer in charge (OIC), P Kungumaraju.
Since the start of COVID-19 in 2020, the three final NTC mills that were still operating—Tata, Podar, India United, and Digvijay—have been shut down. A year before, Digvijay was shut down. The lack of cash, according to union leader Seema Sansare, is to blame for the non-payment of salaries and benefits.
After COVID-19, the mill workers—the majority of whom are jobless—were paid 50 per cent of their earnings.
After the demonstration on 2nd June, the officers in command met with the workers and gave them an assurance that he was working to get the money for their wage released, with the proviso that it would only be 50 per cent of the amount. Another employee pointed out that while the corporation provided medical care to its employees at 50 per cent in Delhi, it did not do so in Mumbai. Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Arvind Sawant of the Shiv Sena (UBT) of South Mumbai were in attendance.
