Toyota workers union petitions labour dept

As stand-off between employees and management of Toyota Kirloskar Motor over the lockout of two plants at Bidadi near here continues, employees union today petitioned the state Labour Department over engaging contractors in production and recruitment of new workers.
"We have petitioned the Labour Commissioner and the Chief Inspector (Factories) that the company is engaging contract labour in the line of production. This is illegal as the company don't have licence for this. They have licence only for support activities that include loading and unloading," TKMEU President Prasanna Kumar told PTI.
He said: "We have also got information that company is recruiting new contract labour. They might have recruited about 200 new contract labour in the last few days."

"We have complained about this also to the officials," he added.
In response to a query, the company said: "No, Toyota is not hiring contract labours."
It said: "Contract labour is only used for low skilled operations like loading, unloading, unpacking and sorting activities at the material bays. We have taken the required licences in compliance with the requirements under the labour law for these activities."

State Employment and Training officials had yesterday inspected the plants following a complaint from union that apprentices were being engaged in production without proper training.
Toyota Kirloskar Motor, the subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corp of Japan, had on March 16 declared a lockout, following the failure of talks between the management and the union over wage negotiation.

The union is demanding a wage hike of Rs 4,000 as against Rs 3,050 proposed by the management.
The deadlock took a new twist on Monday after a lockout at two plants was lifted, with employees not resuming work as they objected to signing a good conduct undertaking as demanded by the company.