Workers of the Société International des Travaux Ferroviaires (SITRAFER), a subcontracting company for the Cameroon Railway Company (CAMRAIL), have gone on strike anew. The protest action which started on Monday July 16, they say, is a desperate move to showcase discontentment over seven months of unpaid salaries, spanning October 2011 and July 2012.
Most of the 400 aggrieved workers who staged the sit-in at the train station in the Bassa neighbourhood of Douala, laid claims to accrued salaries totalling FCFA 350 million. For them, the amount should have been paid by July 11, 2012 if resolutions agreed upon at a July 6 crisis meeting between officials of SITRAFER, CAMRAIL and the National Trade Union of Railway Maintenance Workers (SYNATRAMFER) anchored by the Ministers of Transport and Labour and Social Security in Yaounde, were respected. "Shattered hopes and disgruntlements following our inability as breadwinners to maintain daily contributions to the family pantry all this while have compelled us to resort to this social strategy to amplify our cries," they could be heard saying.
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