After a prolonged struggle for 28 days under the leadership of AICCTU, railway contract sanitation workers of Mancheswar, Odisha, achieved a significant victory. At the end of January 2022, all of a sudden, sixty-five contract sanitation workers - men and women - of the Mancheswar Rail Carriage Repairing Workshop of East Coast Railway (ECoR) were thrown out of their jobs and pushed to starvation and misery by the railway administration. They were terminated by changing the nature of the contract. These workers had been employed in the workshop for more than 10 years. Agitated by the whimsical and illegal order of the administration, workers resorted to sit-in (dharna) struggle in front of the workshop, from 1st February 2022, under the banner of “Thika Safai Karmachari Union”, affiliated to AICCTU.

With an obvious intention of getting rid of workers of several years of service who should have been otherwise made permanent, the Principal Employer, the ECoR, changed the very nature of the contract from ‘Service tender’ to ‘Work tender’.

By changing the nature of the tender, the administration aims to save nearly 63 lakh rupees but at the cost of the lives of sanitation workers who are not only poor but also from the most downtrodden sections of the society. In the previous practice of Service tender, the base expenditure amount was 1.88 crore per year whereas in the new tender the same was brought down to 1.25 crores which is an indiscriminate reduction by 33 percent. Consequently, the workers strength was reduced to 20 from 65 rendering 45 of them redundant. Moreover, even those 20 workers were offered only 21 days of employment every month denying even a government stipulated minimum wage of Rs 546 per day.

The central labour department was forced to intervene because of relentless and determined struggle of workers and the administration was directed to reinstate the services of all workers who were illegally retrenched by restoring the previous practice of service tender. The administration agreed but sought a time of two months to reinstate the services of workers. The union refused to accept and demanded immediate reinstatement of all retrenched workers and continued with the struggle.

Finally, the union called off the strike on 28 Feb, only after the Chief Workshop Manager assured immediate reinstatement of workers. One month long struggle of contract sanitation workers of Mancheshwar is another feather in the cap of the struggle of railway contract sanitation workers in the country.