Coal India appears to have achieved significant “progress” towards entering into the five-year (2011-2016) wage pact with the labour unions. While details of the deal are not known, sources told Business Line that at a meeting in New Delhi that both sides thrashed out the pending issues to arrive at a consensus.

Sources suggest that the decision on wage hike was arrived, just before the CIL board set out for a board meeting to discuss the possibility of tweaking the recently announced price list based on gross calorific value. The board meet which began at 4.30 PM was yet to be over till this evening.

Though company officials are tight lipped on the development, industry sources said that CIL may enter in the wage pact (National Coal Wage Agreement -IX).

Earlier on January 27, joint bi partite consultative committee on wage negotiation failed to arrive at a decision; reportedly due to fresh demands forwarded by the labour unions pushing the proposed wage hike way above the minimum guaranteed increase of 25%. The meeting also failed to arrive at a conclusion on the next date of the JBCC meeting.

According to sources on January 27, the workers lobby came up with fresh demands to the extent of 10% of basic pay, pushing the total hike to nearly 35% over and above the existing salary and other benefits.

It may be mentioned that the INR 50,000 crore CIL was expecting a 12.5-per cent revenue impact through roll out of the GCV based prices. This was expected to neutralise the INR 5,500 crore to INR 6,000 crore annual increase in expenditure due to an estimated 25% wage hike.

(Sourced from BL)