Cuddalore:
About 14,000 contract workers affiliated to All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) of the state owned Neyveli Lignite Corporation (NLC) commenced an indefinite strike on Saturday demanding among other things service regularization.
A tripartite meeting, convened by R Sivaraj, Central Assistant Labour Welfare Commissioner with the NLC management and representatives of the AITUC on April 19 had failed to find a solution to end the strike.
AITUC leader A Sekar told Press Trust of India (PTI) that the NLC management had reached an agreement with the union in 2008 for service regularisation of the contract workers in a phased manner.
However, the management had allegedly not implemented the agreement so far.
Asked whether power generation would be affected due to the strike, a company spokesperson said, "not even a single Mega Watt of power generation got affected".
The spokesperson also citicised the employees for going with the indefinite strike ahead of "conciliatory meeting" scheduled for April 25.
To a query on the work getting stalled in NLC owned mines, he said, "production in all our mines is not affected. We have got enough stock to run".
NLCs total power generation from three thermal power stations is 2490 Megs Watt. Tamil Nadu now gets 1170 Mega Watt and the remaining capacity is shared among Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry.