IBA calls meet with unions to preempt June 12 strike

After the failure of talks with the chief labour commissioner, the Indian Banks' Association has called for a meeting of all bank unions under the United Forum of Bank Unions for further negotiations on wage revision and to persuade the employees to withdraw their planned June 12 strike.

Officials said the IBA had three major agendas to discuss, the most important being to persuade the unions to accept the new pension scheme, otherwise known as the contributory pension scheme, for new bank employees.

Currently, the bank unions are vehemently opposing it since unions of no other sector has accepted it to date.

The next issue was to decide how much amount the unions will share out of the total pension liabilities. The pension liabilities works out to Rs 6,000 crore (Rs 60 billion), which is the gap between the funds required and funds available with the banks.

Sources said a desirable distribution would have been Rs 2,500 crore (Rs 25 billion) from the employees, which unions will have to agree, and Rs 3,500 crore (Rs 35 billion) from IBA. "However unions are not willing to part more than Rs 1,500 crore (Rs 15 billion) as gathered by us informally," said IBA sources.

Thirdly, the amount of wage revision. The employees are demanding a 20 per cent hike in their salary as opposed to IBA's 15 per cent raise.

One of the officers told Business Standard, "The whole country is hailing the role of public sector banks in saving the financial sector from collapsing unlike in other countries. If that is the case and given the fact that the central government employees have already got a hefty raise in their salaries, are the bank officers getting penalised for their service to the nation?"