Deregulation and Labour Policies in a Public Sector Firm

This paper aims to examine how ITI sought to respond to the challenges and threats posed by deregulation, and the impact these actions had on the employees. It concentrates on the initiatives pursued by the company in order to build a workforce and forge labour policies tailored more closely to the imperatives of competition, and evaluates how far these objectives were achieved. For in the management's own words, ITI needed to evolve from being a 'production agency of DoT' to a 'business company' - an evolution which called for it to embrace new strategic options as well as new ways of doing things, if it was to stand a chance of survival in the changed business environment. In the field of labour relations, these revised priorities would take two main directions: the implementation of a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS), and the tightening of disciplinary controls together with cutbacks in welfare benefits.