SBI staff to keep date with strike

Employees of State Bank of India (SBI), the nation’s largest lender, plan to go ahead with a strike from April 3 seeking higher pensions after talks with management failed, a union spokesman said.

As many as 205,000 employees will go on an indefinite strike starting Monday morning, Amar Pal, president of the All India State Bank of India Officers’ Federation, said. “Talks with the management have failed and we are going ahead with the strike,” Pal said.

SBI employees make up a fifth of the total workforce at the nation’s banks. The strike will affect cheque transactions, as well as trading in the bond and foreign exchange markets where the bank is a leading participant.

The bank has not lifted its monthly employee pension of Rs 4,250 since 1992, and the amount is now far too low for a retiree to live on, said Umesh Naik, president of the State Bank of India Staff Federation, while leading a demonstration of workers in New Delhi.

The pension paid to families in the event of the death of an employee is a “mere” Rs 300- 1,000 a month, he said.

Other state-run lenders pay retiring officials 50%of their last drawn salary as a pension, without imposing any ceiling on the amount they can draw, Naik said.

India’s bank unions, backed by communist parties, often use strikes to focus attention on their grievances. India’s ruling Congress arty-led coalition government depends on the support of communist parties to govern. More than 7 million employees of India’s state-owned banks, insurers, airports and factories went on a day’S strike on September 29 to protest government moves to encourage bank mergers and asset sales to attract overseas investment.

On March 9, as many as 900,000 workers from state-run banks planned to strike, demanding that

one dependent of any employee who dies while working be entitled to a job. The strike was canceled after the government said it would examine their demands.