The employees union at Nicholas Piramal India has alleged that the pharma firm has illegally terminated services of all the 67 permanent workers employed at its Deonar unit near Mumbai and prevented them from entering the company premises since July 15.

"The company has violated its own assurance given to the courts and from July 15, 2002, prevented all the workers (including 43 women) from entering the premises. The reason stated by the company for terminating the services of the workers was that it had sold its manufacturing activity at Deonar plant to a firm called Encore Quality Management," N Vasudevan, convenor of the union, told Business Standard in an e-mailed statement.

The company has, however, refuted all the allegations. "Our Deonar unit has been unviable on a standalone basis due to its high cost of operations. When the unviability of the facility increased, we tried to elicit co-operation from the union to arrive at a mutually agreed voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) as also transfers to other locations where we had jobs for our people," NPIL said in a press release.

When the union refused to accept these offers, the company declared a VRS scheme about three years ago. On the request of the workers, VRS was re-introduced and 121 workmen out of 269 accepted it. At the same time, the company transferred some 86 workers.

During this period, the company made repeated efforts to resolve the issues, but the union took a recalcitrant stand, and chose to fight them legally. It filed unfair labour practices complaints before the industrial court against the company, NPIL said in the press release.

The industrial court, in its operative part of the order given on July 12, 2002, has dismissed all the four complaints by the union. On July 13, NPIL sold the activity of the Deonar unit to Encore Quality Management and the name of the buyer was intimated to the workmen in the termination letters, NPIL added.

"The company has not breached any provisions of the undertaking given by it to the Bombay High Court in September 2000," NPIL said.

The Deonar plant is one of the company's oldest units and its workers have been on the company rolls for 25-30 years (even before the Piramals took over), the union said.

The union is planning to take all steps, legal and agitational, to get redressal for the alleged 'injustice', the union said. The workers and the Nicholas Employees' Union, the officially recognised union under the MRTU Act, have refused to accept the sale as well as termination and registered their strong protest.

The Trade Union Solidarity Committee has condemned NPIL's action and demanded that the government take immediate steps to protect the interests of the workers as per the existing provisions of the labour law.

NPIL shifted the production units (including the Deonar unit) to the new plants including Pithampur and had availed of sales tax and income tax subsidies under Section 80(I) of the Income Tax act.

NPIL's Pithampur unit was set up as a new unit to meet the additional market needs and the company has not breached any provision of either the Sales Tax Act or Income Tax Act, NPIL said.