Passengers continued to suffer for the second consecutive day on Monday as the running staff members of the Bangladesh Railway continued their movement for restoration of their previous benefits for working extra hours.
Since Sunday the members, under the banner of the Bangladesh Railway Running Staff and Sramik Karmachari Samity, stopped doing additional duty except scheduled eight hours and stopped doing duty at rest.
On Monday journeys of some trains were cancelled and many trains ran late behind their schedules, said the railway officials.
A senior official of Bangladesh Railway said that on Monday from Dhaka journeys of 18 local trains had been cancelled.
‘The running staff members are not working in the way they should which disrupts our train schedules,’ he added.
The union general secretary Md Mujibur Rahman told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· that before 2022 they got special financial facilities under the Railways Act.
The running staff members including locomasters, assistant locomasters and sub-locomasters have duty period of eight hours daily, but they had to work for an average 15 to 18 hours due to shortage of workforces, he said.Â
Under the law, they got the mileage facility which meant that for every 100 kilometres of train run they received an additional amount of money equivalent to one day’s basic salary.
Following this, if a working day is defined by an eight-hour shift, the running staff members work the equivalent of maximum three months of working days in a single month, Mujibur said, adding that before 2022 they had got salaries like that.
They also got an additional 75 per cent of their pension higher than their basic salary, he continued.
In 2022, the Finance Division cancelled these facilities and the running staffs started their movement demanding these facilities again.
On Sunday, the union submitted a letter to the Bangladesh Railway director general office saying that they started a movement from the day to realise their demands.
Mujibur Rahman said that they would continue their movement.
As per the union, there are over 800 locomasters, assistant locomasters and sub-locomasters under the railway now.
