Labour Dept sans ALC for 5 months

Amarjot Kaur
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, February 25

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It’s been five months since the Labour Department at Sector 30 has been functioning without the apex authority — Assistant Labour Commissioner (ALC). Labour Inspector Ramesh Dhiman has been handling the additional charge of the ALC since November and no cases have been resolved in this time period, says Dhiman. “As an officiating ALC, I handle everything except court cases,” he says.

According to the court procedure, all cases, disputes and grievances of labourers are first addressed to the ALC, who then refers them to the labour court, if necessary, or in case he/she cannot resolve the matter. In such a situation, labourers are at the receiving end. In fact, some of them have even withdrawn their cases while others await their fate at the hands of the “slow-moving government and judicial machinery”.

At the Labour Department, this correspondent chanced upon a meeting with harrowed employees of “Kingdom of Beer”, a restaurant-cum-brewery in the city’s Sector 26, which shut down in December last year. The employees had been doing the rounds of the Labour Department, receiving only one hearing date after another. The employees shared that some of them had not received their salaries since August.

The executive chef of the restaurant, Rajesh, who has not received his five-month salary amounting to Rs 1,20,000, has withdrawn his complaint. “He has been told at the department that it will take some five or six years to resolve this issue as judicial cases move at a slow pace, so he decided to take his case back,” said Saurabh, the continental chef, who is still perusing his case at the department along with 10 other employees. Apart from Rajesh, Nepal-based Vijay, too, has taken his complaint back. “I have to work, madam. I can’t keep coming here to settle this for years to come. I’m going back to Nepal. I’ll look at it like a bad experience,” said Vijay. Rohit Khan, who did the house-keeping for the restaurant, shared that he now works as a daily wager and that has no time to “wreak his head” with the department. “This place is being run like a headless chicken; I am a daily wager and I’d rather spend my time on making an extra buck than come here every day. However, I need my money; it’s my blood, sweat and tears. I can’t just let my work go waste, but there’s no one here to listen to our pleas. We’ve been coming here since the restaurant shut down in December,” he said.

Others from the restaurant shared that most of them had been asked to take their cases back. Parlad Kumar, the brewer, asked, “If we are being advised to take the case back, I don’t know how many others are being told so too. This department, I am told, is the first filter when it comes to labour issues. Where do we go now?”

While the authorities kept dilly-dallying on giving the pendency data to this correspondent, despite repeated requests, Dhiman said, “Since November, all cases have been pending.”  Despite sending messages and repeated calls, DC Mandeep Singh Brar refused to comment on why no ALC had been appointed since November.