Sanitary workers skip collection, garbage pile up rapid

Sanitary workers skip collection, garbage pile up rapid

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, Aug 17, 2017: Garbage in houses, apartments and public bins piled up in the city on August 16, Wednesday as civic workers of the private company handling solid waste for the Mangaluru City Corporation stayed away from collecting solid waste on a door-to-door basis.  However, the MCC workers swept the roads and streets, according to health officials in the corporation.

The workers were mainly demanding that the civic body should directly credit salary to their bank accounts. The corporation has awarded the contract of collection and transportation of solid waste to Antony Waste Handling Cell Pvt. Ltd.

As the workers struck work, public bins on roadsides and bins in apartments were overflowing with garbage by evening and garbage kept by people near their gates remained as it was in the morning.

Mayor Kavita Sanil stated that it was an issue between the company and its workers and the people have been made to suffer. She would call a meeting to resolve the issue on today, Thursday.

A health official said that there were 623 civic workers in addition to the 130 drivers employed by the company. The workers have been paid salary till May. The salary for June has been released to the company which, in turn, would have to pass it on to all workers. The salary for July has not been released to the company.

Regarding their demand, the official said that the corporation has not been able to credit the salary directly to the bank accounts as all workers have not furnished their Aadhaar numbers required for the bank transfer.

In addition, there was an issue relating to recording the attendance of workers. As the workers kept changing their place of work from ward to ward on a daily basis, it had become difficult to record their individual names. Hence, they have been instructed to work in a given ward permanently from this month as it would become easy to record attendance with names.

Manual attendance was being taken from this month for counting the days of work individually. It will be easy to credit the salary directly to their bank accounts in future. Biometric attendance system would be introduced shortly. They were also being issued identity cards now.

Earlier, the attendance was based on total head count. The official hoped that the workers might return to work today, Thursday August 17.