About 500 construction workers including many women attached to All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) blocked Tiruchi Road at Ramanathapuram on Tuesday seeking fulfilment of their various long pending demands, for the welfare of labourers.
State vice-president of the construction workers wing of AITUC N. Selvaraj presided over the demonstration in Coimbatore.
Their key demand is regularising functioning of the welfare board for unorganised sector, and to treat labourers union as authorised representatives of the members of the board attached to trade unions.
They said that labourers had to forgo their salary for a couple of days to appear in person and apply for free spectacles worth Rs. 500 that the Government gave them. This was among the various procedures for which the members had to come to the board office.
They also sought pension of Rs. 5,000 per month for members of the board who are aged above 60 years, Rs. 5 lakh for families of members who died a natural death and Rs. 10 lakh for the families of the welfare board members who suffered an unnatural death.
The demonstrators went on a procession to gherao the welfare board office and were blocked by the police, following which they sat on the road.
This disrupted traffic on Sungam to Ramanathapuram direction for more than half an hour. The police said that 473 demonstrators including 276 women were removed and taken to a marriage hall.
In Tirupur, the workers laid siege to the Labour Department office and also staged demonstration on Tuesday.
They also wanted the Government to ensure that the corpus lying with the welfare board generated through collection of levies from every building constructed, be used only for disbursal of welfare assistances for construction workers.
“As of now, the corpus with the board is as large as Rs. 1,000 crore,” said AITUC district president N. Sekar.
