SHILLONG: The president of All India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA), Ragen Nagar, has said that cooperative banks should function in an autonomous manner and their restructuring is needed to ensure that the cooperative sector meets the challenges in the banking industry.
He was speaking at the meeting of All India Cooperative Bank Employees’ Federation (AICBEF) on Sunday. Leaders of AIBEA attended the meeting hosted by the Meghalaya Co-operative Apex Bank Employees’ Union.
Nagar said state controls were creating undue pressure on the cooperative banks and not allowing them to function in an autonomous manner adding there were no effective reforms either to help them.
“Cooperative banks movement is a people’s movement. It has a big role in serving the farmers but the government is not taking any effective steps to strengthen the cooperatives although the cooperative sector is facing multiple problems,” he said.
Nagar added that there should be a restructuring of cooperative banks so that they can face the challenges from not only commercial and private banks but new generation private banks which enjoy technological advantage.
He said the Shillong meeting will go a long way in organising a cooperative bank employees’ movement under the banner of AICBEF and AIBEA.
Privatisation threat
Nagar was critical of the government’s move to privatise the public sector undertakings and warned that it will hand over the banking industry to the private sector.
Hitting out at the Centre, he said that the labour reforms are anti-employee and pro-corporate/pro-employer. He rued that the minimum wage has been reduced even in the wage board bill and it will vary according to states dispensing with the government minimum wage.
)He expressed concern over the anti-labour policy of the government which has thrown the banking industry and the trade unions in difficult times.
“There is a very well thought out anti-labour policy of the government. Slowly they want to marginalise not only public sector banks or banking institutions but the trade unions also.
“They want to completely wipe out trade unions. The attack on the working class and on the bank employees has been increasing,” he said. Nagar pointed out that the Indian economy is slowing down due to demonetisation and GST which was introduced in haste while pointing out that many economists have said that the government is going the wrong way.
“The economy is slowing down which is adversely affecting the working class. Today, retrenchment is done at random and new types of rules are imposed even in banks.
There is an advisory saying employees who are 55 years of age or have been in service for 30 years can be asked to leave in public interest. We will be sacrificed in public interest,” he said.
Stating that the working class is facing a rude reality as recruitment is not adequate and contractualisation is increasing, he said that in the banks, permanent employees are being reduced as 39 per cent of the work is done by contractual employees.
“The working class is fighting, bank employees are also fighting but the government is in no mood to listen. The government has also decided to corporatise defence production,” he said.
