Balochistan Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik on Sunday directed all government departments to implement labour laws in the province in letter and spirit. He was speaking as chief guest at a three-day Sindh Labour Conference held here under the auspices of an organising committee and Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research at Gulshan-e-Maymar. Senior journalist I. A. Rahman presided over the last session of the conference.
The Balochisn chief minister on this occasion announced that the first-ever provincial tripartite labour conference after the 18th amendment would be held in Quetta in the last week of October.
He nominated Dr Kaiser Bengali as a focal person to organise the provincial tripartite labour conference.
Earlier, he said that Balochistan's government was the first to support land reforms during a hearing of a case in Supreme Court.
Speaking on the occasion, I. A. Rahman of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said that the situation of collective bargaining for labour was deplorable in Pakistan.
Regretting that trade unions movement has weakened over the years, he asked the industrial workers to help the agriculture and rural workers in making their unions.
Earlier, senior economist and a former federal minister Dr Hafeez A. Pasha said it was sad that majority of the workers were disorganised in Pakistan.
The ILO report indicated that only one per cent of Pakistani labour was organized in the trade unions, he added.
In India, about 33pc workers were registered in trade unions and in Turkey 55pc workers are with trade unions, he said, adding that military governments in Pakistan had crushed the trade unions.
He said Pakistan was lagging behind in the implementation of labour laws as well as the ILO Conventions.
Apprehending that Pakistan might loose the status of GSP-Plus by the European Union at the two-year review in 2016, he said that the country will have to take serious measures to implement 27 international conventions, including eight pertaining to Core Labour Rights.
He said inequality in land distribution has increased tremendously in Pakistan. Since mechanisation of agriculture sector, big landlords had become even stronger. Over 13,000 landlords' families were occupying eight million acres of land in Pakistan, he added.
He said due to bad governance in Employees Old-age Benefits Institution (EOBI), this institution covered a small portion of the workers, although it had assets of Rs200 billion and every year its reserves were increasing. There was a scope of increasing the pension of the retired workers to Rs6000, per month, he opined.
He said around 14pc workers did not have living wages because they were unemployed or underemployed. "We have a lot of bonded labour. ILO estimates that there were about two million bonded workers in Pakistan, he added.
He said it was a shocking fact that about 220m people did not eat food for two times in Pakistan. Around 40pc labourers were doing job for 50 hours a week.
Deploring that only 44pc workers were getting minimum wages in Pakistan, he said that the main problem in the country was lack of implementation of minimum wages law.
Dr Pasha said big landlords' income was more than Rs6500 billion, but their income tax payment was less than Rs1 billion.
Despite all resistance, he added, he had introduced the agriculture income tax and removed Octroi tax in 1997.
Dr Kaiser Bengali in his presentation on "Privatisation" said that the government had spent only 16pc of the privatisation proceeds on the loan repayment.
He pointed out that the government had mainly sold the profit-earning corporations and those were sold at throw away prices. Unfortunately, after the privatisation, these industries were closed down. He said most of the companies sold to foreign investors were, instead of spending their profits in Pakistan, were repatriating their profits from Pakistan.
The conference demanded of the government to bring an end privatisation process to provide universal social security protection to all workers and to provide equal right of the collective bargaining to all the labourers.
The moot also urged the government to ensure tripartite mechanism for making all labour laws and implement all the international labour conventions, which Pakistan has already ratified.
Comments
Comments are closed.