AAP leaders back employees protesting for pay hike

Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, September 6

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has extended its full support to the government employees organisations currently on hunger strike to press the government for the acceptance of their long-standing demands.

In a joint statement issued from the party headquarters today, state president and Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann not only announced the party’s full support to the striking employees but also deputed senior party leaders, including Kotkapura MLAs Kultar Singh Sandhwan and Kulwant Singh Pandori (MLA), to take part in the employees’ ‘dharna’ in Sector 17 here.

Extending the party’s wholehearted support to the employees’ cause across the state, Sandhwan said for the past more than 25 years, the previous Akali Dal governments and now the ruling Captain Amarinder Singh government had made a raft of promises to the farmers, Dalits, the youths, besides a majority of employees in the state holding professional degrees to take to the roads for their legitimate rights. He added that the employees had been left to take to the agitational recourse due to their (preceding governments) anti-employee policies, stating that they were left to hold ‘dharnas’ resorting to hunger strike and other modes of protest and even climbing water reservoirs due to the governments’ ill-conceived policies.

Sandhwan demanded that the government should immediately consider implementing the Sixth Pay Commission for government employees pending since January 2016, giving DA arrears, ensuring retirement benefits to the employees on their retirement, restoring old pension scheme (2004), terminating probationary period, regularising temporary, contractual, outsource employees and closing ‘Janjua tax’ of Rs 200 per month.