Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific

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Bangladesh garment workers demonstrate over beatings

Around 700 employees from the Pallmall Style garment factory in Uttara, Dhaka chased a manager from the factory on January 11 and followed him to the local police station where they held a protest, accusing him of beating workers. The workers barricaded the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, stopping traffic for more than an hour, and demanded that the manager be charged for assaulting one of their female colleagues that morning and for past beatings he had inflicted on them.

Employees returned to the factory after senior police and company representatives said they would call a meeting to resolve the matter. Workers were assured that the manager would not be allowed back into the factory.



Kerala telephone workers on hunger strike

Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) employees in the Kanjikode industrial area, Kerala began a protest hunger strike on January 13 over pay and job security. Workers at the state-owned company are demanding payment of two months' salaries and want ITI to be merged with the government-owned telecom giant Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) or taken over by the Ministry of Defence.

The Indian government wants to fully privatise its telecommunications industry and claims that ITI is a sick industrial company or "SIC" and referred it to the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). The Indian government established BIFR in 1987, following pressure from the World Bank and the IMF. Its function has been to justify privatising SIC government enterprises.

The Joint Action Committee at Kanjikode has rejected ITI being classified as SIC and claims that the company has made a profit for the past 12 years and paid taxes totalling 6,600 million rupees ($US132 million).


Indian teachers jailed for demonstrating

Over 70 protesting elementary trainee teachers (ETT) in the Punjab were cane-charged and jailed on January 11 for disrupting a political rally for Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal. Angry over their companions' arrests, other teachers rallied outside the court the next day and marched through Maler Kotla markets, accusing the Punjab government of trying to oppress the teachers' protest.

ETT union district president Sukhbir Singh said the teachers were demonstrating because the government had not honoured a promise to absorb ETT teachers into the state education department.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/wkrs-j17.shtml