Employees of Kingfisher Airlines who have not been paid salaries for the past 17 months today threatened to launch an indefinite hunger strike from Monday demanding stringent action against the defaulting company.
They also sought disqualification of corporate leaders from the membership of Parliament on charges of such default.
“We are going on indefinite hunger strike from January 6. We have approached other political parties as well but as of now we have not got any satisfactory response from them. We request you to support us in whatever ways possible,” Anjan Kumar Deveshwar, a Kingfisher employee, said in a letter on behalf of the employees to Delhi minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader, Manish Sisodia.
Alleging that Kingfisher kept paying its employees posted abroad due to the strict laws applicable there, they said, “non payment of salary should be treated as a cognizable offence so that no one else has to suffer like us.”
As of now there is no clear law to deal with non-payment of salary by the management, the staffers said in the letter.
Besides non-payment of salaries, the Vijay Mallya-owned private carrier, which stopped operations in October 2012, has defaulted on payment of loans worth over Rs 7,200 crore, secured mainly from the public sector banks.
It also owes over Rs 390 crore to the Airports Authority of India, in addition to defaulting on service tax payment.
The Kingfisher employees also urged AAP to move the Supreme Court and use the Right to Information Act on the issue, saying “It is public money on which they thrive.
Therefore, it is the right of public to ascertain that their hard earned money is not misused.”