The case of Visitor Hostel Workers
Briefly, the case involves dismissal of sixteen workers from Visitors' Hostel in March 2010 without reason and without notice. Due to a lot of community support they were taken back, but since then have been harassed by the employer : one of the workers who has been a waiter for fourteen years is asked suddenly asked to shift to sanitation, several workers have been issued show cause letters on insignificant charges including "disrupting the whole VH system by coming 5 minutes late", several "warning letters" have been issued for alleged faults in the functioning of the reception during the night shift when (s)he were not even present, one of the employees was given 7 days of forced "baithki" as punishment because he left 15 minutes early, many of them have been forced to run errands for the institute officials (and not even compensated for expenses incurred in the same) etc. A couple of workers were subsequently fired.
This happened with clear support from the institute which in a June 2010 circular, went back on several promises given to the workers in September 2007 office order. A discussion can be found in this Hamara Manch update.
The most detailed information can be found in this Hamara Manch report. We highly encourage the reader to look at the same. Apart from the fact that the workers were fired without reason, particularly telling is the subsequent harassment they faced.
There were also short updates by Hamara Manch:
Two updates informing about the reinstatement of workers (but do read the above report for what they faced subsequently).When the workers were reinstated in 2010, Citizen's forum congratulated them on their successful struggle through this letter (hindi version).