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July 29, 2014
Mr Stéphane Richard
Chairman & CEO of Orange,
78, rue Olivier de Serres, Paris 75015, France
Subject: Telephone Exchange Workers at IIT Kanpur Campus, India
Dear Mr. Richard,
We, the concerned alumni of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), bring to your notice an important case of gross injustice in terms of labor rights and negligence of contract agreements in which your company is involved as a stakeholder within the premises of an Institute of world repute – IIT Kanpur. Your arm company, M/s Equant Technology Services India Pvt Ltd (ETSIPL), signed a contract with IIT Kanpur for maintaining its new telephone infrastructure, which came into effect in Dec 2013.
The negligence started with ETSIPL sub-contracting the services to a third company, S2 Infotech Private Ltd (contractor), even though the contract has no provisions for such sub-contracting. The contract clearly states in clause 34 that ETSIPL has to employ all supervisors, technicians and all other staff. Further, the contract provided a basic monthly service charge of Rs1,98,620/- plus service tax to take care of salaries/wages of its employees. This was subject to further increase on account for inflation and adjustments in minimum wage levels as announced by the government. The amount was enough to pay for its eight employees at least the same take home salaries, Rs 13,294/- per month, which they received in Nov 2013 on the basis of the old contract. But the new contractor started paying them Rs 7,164/- per month from Dec 2013 onwards, almost half of what they received just one month earlier.
The workers and their families’ living standard has declined sharply in the current environment of high inflation when prices of essential items are skyrocketing. This was shocking for everyone – students, faculty, staffs, community members and other fellow workers – in the campus. Even the alumni/alumnae living outside the campus could not remain unaffected. Demanding a hike in the workers' wages to restore to the level of Nov 2013 wages, the employees and IIT Kanpur community started petitioning their Director, Dr. Indranil Manna. The alumni, too, wrote to the Director, several other administrators and IIT Kanpur Alumni Association to bring speedy justice to the concerned employees and appealed to the Institute for restoring the Nov 2013 wages.
The result of this collective effort was that the May 2014 salary showed a slight increase from Rs 7,164/- to Rs 8,626/- per month. In addition, the contractor has paid a special allowance of Rs 10,719/- in order to only partially compensate for the lost wages from Dec 2013 to Apr 2014. Then came the month of June and workers were paid Rs 8,850/-, a minor revision to the May salary arising due to the ad-hoc measures involved in the deductions of ESI/EPF. But even this monthly income without accounting for inflation remains substantially Rs 4,444/- short of the Nov 2013 income. Based on the pay-slips of workers, a table has been provided in the appendix to help understand the changes in wages.
It is very clear from the pay-slips that not only the present take home salaries of employees are close to only 65% of their Nov 2013 wages, there also exist various inconsistencies in ESI/EPF deductions. They also do not seem to fall in line with the ESI Act, 1948, and the EPF Act, 1952. Despite the Institute passing an office order in May 2013, the employees are not able to access their online EPF accounts. Nor are they able to avail the local ESI facilities because of several irregularities in their ESI accounts. The contractor has also been found violating Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, as they have entirely done away with the statutory annual bonus of minimum Rs 3,500/- and maximum Rs 8,400/-. Therefore, we conclude that the contractor is denying these workers fair wages in spite of having been formally asked by the Institute to clarify the basis of payments.
Mr Richard, your company is a global IT and communications service provider with services in 220 countries. The company, Orange Business Services, also claims to do things differently. It says that it listens and it acts. Your firm is also committed to zero tolerance towards corruption. So we request you to please look into this issue with the urgency it deserves and fulfill the just demands of the employees of its own arm company.
The contract is for a period of 10 years and such a long contract cannot sustain itself on the basis of continuing gross injustices. The concerned employees are very experienced and highly skilled. They maintain the telephone exchange system very efficiently. We, the concerned alumni together with many in the student body and faculty, are interested in and committed towards the welfare of workers of our alma mater the same way as those in Europe and the US where Orange Business Services provides similar services and has local employees.
Thus we support the following demands of the employees and hope that your company will meet all of them:
Restore the Nov 2013 wage level with provision to account for inflation, and ensure that your arm company, ETSIPL, and its subcontractor, follow all the labor laws in a consistent manner.
Compensate the employees for the portion of the wages lost, with respect to Nov 2013 wage level, in the last 7 months.
Ensure that as per the Office order (May 24th 2013) of IIT Kanpur, ETSIPL and its subcontractor maintain workers’ EPF accounts in Kanpur, and that workers can avail ESI facilities locally.
We look forward to hearing from you. Please do no hesitate to ask if you have any questions or require clarifications from us atcitizensforumatiitk@gmail.com. Enclosed you will find the contract and our past appeals to the Director, IIT Kanpur, and IIT Kanpur Alumni Association.
With warm regards,
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Ajeeta Nyola, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India
Amit Singh, Univ of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
Prof. Ashok Gupta, Ohio University, USA
Prof. Deepankar Basu, Professor, Univ of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Dheeraj Singh, Gurgaon, India
Himanshu Srivastava, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai, India
Dr. Manish Mishra, Heidelberg University, Germany
Manu Agrawal, Interglobe Technologies, India
Rajendra Sahai, Principal, DCI+SDE, San Francisco, USA
Rajesh Kumar, IFP Energies Nouvelles, Rueil Malmaison, France
Dr. Sandeep Agarwal, California, USA
Shamim Akhter, Arab National Bank, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Siddhartha Mitra, Medametrics, New York, USA
Sushil Handa, Principal, Consulting Engineer, Montreal, Canada
Dr. V N Sharma, Retired SAIL Executive, India
Dr. Vaibhav Vaish, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Dr. Vivek Mehta, Tezpur, India
CC: IIT Kanpur Director, Dr. Indranil Manna; Orange Management, France
Encl:
Copy of new telephone exchange contract (2013) : http://iitkcf.appspot.com/cz3WMt
Past appeals to Director, IIT Kanpur, and IIT Kanpur Alumni Association: http://iitkcf.appspot.com/rue3iS
Appendix: Changes in the monthly income of telephone exchange workers
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