By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi, July 7, 2020: Journalist unions have decided to observe July 9 as the Press Rights Day after more than a thousand journalists lost their jobs in recent months in India.
A press release from the Delhi Union of Working Journalists on July 7 quotes some analysts to say that another 30,000 may become jobless in next months. Most journalists who lost jobs had to go “without even the retrenchment benefits prescribed under the Working Journalists Act or the Industrial Disputes Act,” the union regrets.
“As all of you understand, the workforce in every section of media is going through a severe crisis. Since the lockdown the media owners have unleashed severely exploitative attacks on workers in this sector,” the union points out.
Another equally serious problem confronting journalists is wage loss. “There are media houses that have asked employees to go on compulsory leave without pay. Others have dictated pay cuts. The decrease in salary ranges between ten to fifty per cent,” explains the journalists’ union.
The union has called all journalists to observe July 9 as the Press Rights Day, as proposed by the Kerala Union of Working Journalists. The day marks the 19th death anniversary of Victor George, a press photographer who died while photographing landslides in Kerala.
“We must all come together for a joint protest program,” urges the union while pointing out that “journalists in India are facing landslides of critical proportions at this point. A number of reporters and photographers have been infected with the deadly virus and ill treatment by the managements and the governments have made their lives doubly difficult.”
The union also urges journalists to join the online protest and take photographs with placards demanding protection of job and wage. “Please post those photographs on your website and social media handles and let us give a message to the managements and the governments that journalists and workers are united in this struggle,” it says.
It regrets that the federal and most state governments “remain as mute spectators as journalists are retrenched and the laws of the land are violated blatantly by managements.”