Scribes’ union condemns PTI retrenchment

SHILLONG: The Indian Journalists’ Union (IJU) has condemned the arbitrary move of the Press Trust of India to sack 297 of its employees across the country.
In a statement, IJU president S.N Sinha and general secretary D. Amar said the massive retrenchment of permanent employees in the country’s largest news wire agency was not just shocking but highly grave and unacceptable.
Worse, the way the management retrenched the employees by issuing a notice with ‘immediate effect’ and placing the retrenchment letters on the desk of the employees or putting them on the website was unethical, unheard of and smacked of sinister design.
The IJU leadership was equally concerned that the management particularly laid off permanent employees under the Wage Board to not only weaken trade union movement in the media but perhaps to replace employees with contractual jobs so as to have a free hand to ‘hire and fire’ employees and give a go by to job security as provided under the law.