To
All Presidents and General Secretaries of the state units, Working Committee Members and Office Bearers of the IFWJ,
Dear Comrade,
Greetings of the New Year!
We are glad to inform that Shri B.V. Mallikarjunaiah has again been elected the President of the Indian Federation of Working Journalists (IFWJ). The announcement of his unanimous election was made on 27th of December 2019 by the Central Returning Officer (CRO) Shankar Dutt Sharma. The result of his election has been widely reported in newspapers and web portals. The CRO Sharma was ably assisted by the ACRO Shri T.B. Singh in the discharge of his onerous responsibilities. The new tenure of B.V. Mallikarjunaiah will start from the new delegate session, which will be held in the new future in consultation with other state units. It will be attended by the National Councilors and the Delegates of all the state units.
List of National Councilors and Delegates
It is, therefore, requested that all state units should send the list of the National Councilors and Delegates to the IFWJ Headquarters on email ‘ifwj.ifwj@gmail.com’ at the earliest possible but not later than 25th of January 2020. It is pertinent to mention here that only the National Councilors will be qualified to file the nomination papers for the election to Working Committee including for the posts of the other office-bearers. In the meantime, the last meeting of the outgoing Working Committee will be held before the Delegate Session some times before 10th of February 2020. We have got the invitation from many state units but the final decision about the date and venue will be taken in consultation with the host state unit.
Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code
The Government of India has decided to amalgamate 14 labour laws into four code bills. One of it, the Wages Code Bill, has already been passed by both Houses of Parliament in August 2019. However, as soon as we came to know about the subsuming of the Working Journalists Act and Fixation of Wages of Journalists Act with the ‘Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code’, we swung into action and sought time from the Union Labour Minister Mr Santosh Gangwar. We met him twice once; at his residence which comprised the IFWJ Vice President Hemant Tiwari, Secretary Siddharth Kalhans, Treasurer Rinku Yadav, National Councilor Ravindra Mishra, UPWJU President Bhaskar Dube among others. The Union Labour Minister assured us in our first meeting itself that the interests of the media employees would be fully taken care of. The IFWJ also submitted a memorandum to him underlining the need of comprehensively amending the Working Journalists Act, which has become thoroughly inadequate after the explosion of the audiovisual and digital media.
The second time we met him in his office in a delegation of all the important media organisations of the country, it included the representatives from Confederation of Newspapers and News Agencies Employees Federation, Indian Federation of Working Journalists, All India Newspaper Employees Federation, Indian Journalists Union, National Union of Journalists (I), PTI Employees Union and Indian Express Newspapers Employees Union. A joint memorandum was submitted to the Minister, who emphatically promised that there would be no compromise with the interests and welfares of the media employees. Earlier in a meeting at Chennai of all the media employees unions had decided to hold a massive protest rally at Jantar Mantar on 10th of October 2019. Pursuant to that, we organised a huge rally at Jantar Mantar on the said date. It was the biggest protest rally of the media persons after 2001.
We are happy to state that our meetings and memoranda to the Minister and protest demonstration yielded the result. otherwise, the government would have passed this Bill also in the same surreptitious manner as the Wages Code Bill was passed without even a whimper of protest even from the All India Trade Union organisations like; BMS, HMS, AITUC, INTUC and CITU etc. It was only due to our concerted efforts that the Government referred our memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee on Labour headed by Bhartruhari Mahtab. The Committee thereafter called us to hear our views on 19th December 2019 in the Annexe of the Parliament. The Committee members and the Chairman assured us to recommend our submissions to the Government not to take amalgamate of the Working Journalists Act with other Acts, which have no commonality with it.
The IFWJ also submitted a separate memorandum of nearly ten pages to the Parliamentary Committee on Labour pointing out the need for the retention of the Working Journalists Act and also for comprehensively amending it so as the benefits of the Working Journalists Act are extended to employees working for the electronic medium or the web portals.
IFWJ has also planned to have a wide discussion on this issue with other trade union bodies of media so that; a strategy could be prepared for safeguarding the Working Journalists Act.
The Working Journalist
Friends! The year 2020 has heralded with a new resolution of the IFWJ to regularly being out ‘The Working Journalist’ every month. Therefore, all state units are requested to send the advertisements, articles, photographs of the activities of their state units.
IFWJ Office
We have to have a new and state-of-the-art office as the lease for the old office has expired. The new office will be all the more necessary because the existing office does not have much space. Our shifting to the new office will depend upon the generous monetary contributions from states. As you all know that the IFWJ is the oldest organisation of the journalists and yet it could not get its own permanent office place because of the insatiable greed of a person, who shamelessly cornered all the recourses for his personal purposes rather than for strengthening the organisation. Thankfully, he has been ousted from the IFWJ. Hopefully, 2020 would be a turning point in the history of the IFWJ. We propose to have an Office Committee for the IFWJ consisting of the members from different states.
Quota-money
We have entered into the new decadal year. So, it is requested of all the state units to send their quota money along with the new list of the members. Let this New Year bring all joys and achievements to our members.
Parmanand Pandey
Secretary-General, IFWJ
