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Chandigarh: Garbage collectors end strike, to resume services from today
The city witnessed a major sanitation crisis after the collectors announced an indefinite strike from Monday, leaving residents burdened with uncollected waste and overflowing bins
After suspending work for two consecutive days, the door-to-door garbage collectors of the city ended their strike on Tuesday and announced that garbage will be collected as routine Wednesday onwards.
The city witnessed a major sanitation crisis after the collectors announced an indefinite strike from Monday, leaving residents burdened with uncollected waste and overflowing bins. With Sunday already being a non-working day for collectors, the discontinuation of services on Monday as well as Tuesday caused significant inconvenience to households.
The collection staff had first suspended their work just for a day on December 21, when the MC commissioner had called for a meeting with them on December 26. However, with no mutual decision, the collectors announced an indefinite strike on Monday.
New MoU to be signed
The protesting workers, who sat for the entire day at the city’s MRF centres demanding better wages, including a salary hike, citing an increase in workload. “According to the memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the municipal corporation (MC), we were initially tasked with garbage collection only from residential areas. However, their responsibilities were expanded last year to include commercial areas, without any corresponding salary revision. We also demand revised MoU with staff-friendly provisions, which has been pending for a long time. The lack of updated terms and fair compensation has made their working conditions unsustainable,” said Dharamvir Rana, president of the door-to-door garbage collection union.
“On Tuesday, municipal commissioner Amit Kumar invited us for a discussion and MC agreed to sign a fresh MoU with the door to door garbage collectors for picking up garbage from commercial areas. This will give a rightful salary increase to those who are picking garbage from residential as well as commercial areas,” he said.
The corporation had on Monday decided to implement the principle of “no work no pay”, according to which salaries of protesting staff will be deducted for the days they will remain on strike, including those who remained on strike on December 21.
Service launched in 2020
In 2020, the civic body had launched systematic door-to-door garbage collection services in residential areas using compartmentalised vehicles and trained drivers. Currently, the corporation provides waste collection services to 2,41,164 households (100% households) in the city, and the waste is collected in segregated form of dry waste, wet waste, sanitary waste, domestic hazardous waste, and plastic waste.
Accordingly, MC had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with as many as 926 door to door garbage collectors individually, from January 1, 2021 to December 12, 2022. The said MoU was time and again extended as the terms and conditions were under review by the officials. MC is working on drafting a new MoU, to be signed with collectors individually. But from April 2023, MC had extended door to door garbage collection from market areas too, but no new MoU was signed with collectors.
