Why sign the petition (or our concerns, briefly).
This is happening primarily to negate the hard won battles for provisions of minimum wage, EPS, and ESI (in which Citizens' Forum was also involved): as was often the case in the past, contractor is bringing its own set of workers to ensure that it does not have to pay legally due wages to the current set of workers.
As is been frequently reported by various community members, the new set of workers will be hired on only an advance payment of "bribe". By several suggestions, the present rate is around 40,000/- to 50,000/- rupees to get placed as a new contract worker. We don't want our institute to become part of the corruption-rot!
That this is a test case: several mess contracts are up for renewal soon. and it is likely that for the same reasons, we will be looking at an even larger number of dismissals in the campus. And then we may be looking towards thousand of workers losing their jobs after having served us for decades!
The workers were doing well, it is one of the best run visitor hostels as anyone who has been to various academic institutes will tell. We alumni were the users of the services! See the reviews on google plus, for example.
That even the contract document was reworded, making ad-hoc decisions (favoritism?) a possibility. See this detailed analysis.
This is happening in the city of Kanpur where the double whammy of demonetization (relevant for all small scale industry) and the emerging difficulties in cattle trade (relevant for the tanneries) in the long run and GST transition in the short run has ensured that the options outside the campus are severely limited. Which means we are looking at workers pushed to a corner, a potently volatile situation!
That there is no career path for the minimum-wages earning workers is problematic and has been flagged by even alumni reports which director themselves commissioned (without involvement of Hamara Manch, Citizens' Forum or any relevant campus community members!) -- see the discussion on DT Thomas report on https://sites.google.com/site/iitkcfdevelopment/our-efforts/protests/2013-dt-report or look at the report itself on David Thomas report.
That this would be unacceptable and illegal in France, where one of the majority stake holder of Sarovar group, the Louver hotels lies ( See http://www.louvrehotels.com/en/our-news/louvre-hotels-group-buys-sarovar-hotels-and-becomes-one-largest-hotel-groups-india and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_du_Louvre for reference). We want our institute to borrow best practices from the world!
We cannot just let go off workers on such large scale without offering support when they have been working with good reviews -- when it happens in IT industry (recently UP), airlines (earlier, Indigo) in large scales there is a serious hue and cry, covered even by media. Almost all software and otherwise big firms offer severance packages and more reasonable terms even when the employees are not made to sustain on "minimum wages" (which is not even "living wages")!
Finally, that this is the humanitarian and the principled thing to do!