17,000 Indian workers win battle for rights
Monday 08 February 2010
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EmailIndian civil rights organisations and unions have revealed that some 17,000 workers building stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi have succeeded in winning basic rights despite a vicious offensive by their bosses.
The labourers, mostly migrant workers from India's poorer southern states, had been cheated out of their wages and forced to live in crude huts without clean drinking water or even proper sanitation.
But after India's TUC joined civil rights campaigners the People's Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) to complain to Delhi's High Court, judges ruled that the workers must be given proper housing and paid wages above the £2 minimum for eight hours of work.
PUDR campaigner Dunu Roy welcomed the victory and urged workers to unionise.
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