PROPOSED STRIKE BY BANK UNIONS

United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) has served a notice to strike work on 22nd Aug nationwide in support of certain demands, which include, among others , the finalisation of the 11th bipartite settlement.

My comments on certain issues mentioned by them are furnished below:

One of the demands made by the unions is to stop write offs by banks! As serving employees/officers they should be aware that writing off is a permitted accounting practice for cleansing the balance sheet of the Banks and hence cannot be objected to. What they might have intended is loan waivers not write off. Write off is only a technical issue whereby banks set off the long outstanding bad debts against the provision held by them (which had been earmarked from profit and loss account of earlier years) without diluting their right to recourse to the defaulters for recovery of dues. The recovery process will continue till the final settlement and whenever recovery is effected in such accounts, it will be credited to the profit ad loss account of the year. Whereas in the case of loan waiver, the defaulters are freed of their repayment liability and hence banks will not go after them for recovery after waiver. In most such cases, where waiver is announced by the government, the defaulted amount wither in full or part will be received from government/RBI. By using the words write off in such notices, the unions are not doing good service to the organisations they serve, spreading a wrong message among the public. 

During the initial discussions on the settlement, IBA has come out with a suggestion that negotiations will be made in the case of  officers upto scale III only as they have been given mandate by the individual banks for this limited purpose only, which has been objected to by the UFBU. I think this is a deliberate attempt on the art of the government/IBA to weaken the trade union movement by dividing the officers into two groups! For some years State bank of India used to issue instructions on the eve of a declared strike to the effect that officers in Scale IV and above were not expected to be members of an association where officers of scale I to III are members and calling upon the officers in scale IV and above not to participate in the strike and also threatening them with disciplinary action if they participated in strike! I had been urging the association those days itself to object to issuance of such circulars as it was against the Officers' Service Rules, but the 'leaders' had not heeded to my suggestion! The present move of the IBA is a culmination of such non action on the part of the association, I believe. At least now I expect the associations to wake up to the situation and call the bluff of the management. If at all the management stands firm on this issue, the officers of scale IV and above should form another association and affiliate it to AIBOC and then go for the negotiations. It is high time the officers in scale IV and above thought about this in all seriousness to avoid any unpleasantness in future.