The Hindu Business Line : BPCL makes contingency plans to face strike threat

BHARAT Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) is fully geared to meet the strike threat by a section of its employees later this month over the Government stake dilution issue by putting in place contingency plans to run the operations without a hitch.

But the company, which has been holding parleys with its employees to allay their apprehensions about any impact of diluting Government shareholding in the company, has not been served any notice of an indefinite strike, according to Mr S. Radhakrishnan, Director (Marketing), BPCL, Mumbai.

Speaking to Business Line, he said the three-day strike notice has been issued only by the other employee unions and BPCL officers would not take part in the strike. He said the management was "confident that we will be able to manage the supply situation" with the officers running the terminals, LPG bottling plants, etc. and did not anticipate any major shortage in the markets.

He said the strike was only to express solidarity with the employees of HPCL, which is slated to be sold to a strategic investor by the Government whereas in BPCL, the Government is going to offer certain percentage of shares through the public issue route. He said he did not know what the BPCL unions would do. But the company was constantly interacting with the employee representatives and has been able to remove a lot of their "unfounded fears" over what disinvestment will or will not do.

Mr Radhakrishnan clarified that the management staff association in BPCL was not involved in any strike move. Even the strike call by other ranks was only for three days; no indefinite strike threat has been issued. Among the labour and clerical staff that were unionised, about 60 per cent of the BPCL staff may go on strike.

The BPCL Marketing Director said some of them were in critical areas such as LPG bottling plants, terminals where petroleum products were loaded and aviation stations but contingency plans have been drawn up to deploy officers to operate them.

Asked about the employee misconceptions about the company post-equity dilution by the Government, he said nobody had really enunciated their fears.

Mr Radhakrishnan said there might be fears that if the Government became a minority stakeholder in the company, jobs may not be as secure as in a Government company. But he did not subscribe to this view. Over the past seven years, the company has been redeploying surplus staff. Nobody has been asked to leave and he did not think that any willing worker would be asked to do so. On how the company was gearing to face up to competition, he said the company had decided to become customer-focused, through six thrust areas of retail, LPG, aviation, lubricants, industrial and commercial customers, besides refining.

Several measures that were not related to petroleum marketing such as In and Out retail outlets, Petro card, Pure for Sure, branded fuel, etc. have been taken to make BPCL petroleum outlets the one-stop shop to meet customer needs and retain their loyalty. Even in respect of lubricants, the company was aggressively promoting the MAK brand. It has also taken up major initiatives in using technology to meet various customer needs.

Asked whether these strategies have resulted in improving the company's top and bottomline, Mr Radhakrishnan said "topline growth of course. Bottomline growth has also been there but we have been constrained by a few problems, such as the inability to raise LPG prices and the stationary subsidy." The company was subsidising the customer and LPG business per se was losing money. In retail, it had kept fairly even but over the last three fortnights, the price increase in petro products was less than the increase in market prices and the margins in petrol and diesel have become negative.

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