Expedite wage talks, says State Banks’ Staff Union-Business Line
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 12:
The central committee of State Banks’ Staff Union (Kerala), which is in session here, has urged the Centre to direct Indian Banks Association (IBA) to expedite wage negotiations.
Wage revision is due in the banking sector from November 1, 2012, according to A. Jayakumar, general secretary of the union.
DEMAND CHARTER
The United Forum of Bank Unions, an umbrella forum representing the nine unions, has presented its charter of demands in time.
Four rounds of bilateral discussions have been held but the IBA, which represents the management, has not come out with concrete proposals.
The negotiation should be settled with a higher load factor to the satisfaction of the workforce, a resolution passed by the central committee said.
Work load and work pressure has increased by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Many employees, including award staff, sit late to complete work. System failures and increased business hours add to the load.
Shortage of staff is acute across cadres, the resolution noted.
LOW SALARY
An assistant in a public sector bank gets around Rs 15,000 as starting salary. Almost all State Government staff and primary school teachers get better salary now.
Jayakumar said that the United Forum conducted nationwide demonstrations on October 22 demanding the settlement of wage revision.
But the IBA expressed its inability to meet the demand on grounds of low productivity in the sector. Productivity is a measure of performance of labour, he said, countering the IBA position.
An analysis of RBI data indicates that banks, particularly those in the public sector, have shown significant progress on productivity and efficiency fronts over last two decades.
Over 34,000 PSU bank branches set to lose Windows XP support: Study
NEW DELHI, NOV 12:
Over 34,000 branches of Indian public sector banks would become vulnerable as the popular Windows XP operating system would no longer be supported by Microsoft in about 150 days, shows a study conducted by the software giant.
The study on the Indian banking sector, conducted by Ascentius Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, said penetration of Windows XP in the sector is as high 70 per cent.
“Some 34,115 Indian PSU bank branches are at risk, thanks to their reliance on Windows XP. Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft, beginning April 8, 2014, but the study shows that the penetration of Windows XP in the banking sector is still high at 40-70 per cent,” Microsoft said in a release.
Amongst the greatest risks facing banks that maintain their Windows XP installations, despite the end of support, are their ability to respond to customers and manage waiting times, it added.
“The fiscal impact of this could be as much as a loss of business opportunity worth Rs 1,100 crore in a day and a loss of income worth Rs 330 crore over a period of 3 days (assuming that a major incident may take 3 days for the systems to come up to normal functioning),” the study said.
A large number of branches that rely on XP, especially in the rural and semi-urban areas may go down and therefore completely “deny service” to customers, it said.
In metro and urban branches, the impact may be as great as 55 per cent of customers face an extended waiting time of up to 30 minutes for an average transaction.
According to a recent Microsoft security intelligence report, XP users are 6 times more likely to be infected than users of modern operating systems like Windows 8.1, despite encountering same amount of threats. XP users are also 21 times more vulnerable.
Microsoft further said that as per a study by research firm IDC in India, companies are prone to spend three times more if they do not put a planned migration strategy in place from the outset.
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