Habib Bank Workers Front (HBWF) has demanded of the bank's chairman to review the salary package 2004-5 and protect the rights of workers in the existing circumstances as they fear loss of jobs and reduction in their expected take-home salaries.
Addressing a press conference at a local hotel on Monday senior labour leader and patron-in-chief of the HBWF, Habibuddin Junaidi said that the employees of all categories should be provided security, protection of jobs and their right to remain in employment till they attain the age of sixty years should be recognised.
He said the system of granting annual increment should be restored and salaries of all the employees indexed with current rate of increase in prices of daily use items.
Junaidi said that the workers were groaning under immense hardship due to increasing cost of living. "To correct this situation the management should restore and revise, with retrospective effect, all allowances and bonuses either reduced or withdrawn, and make adjustments in payments so that previous losses could be adjusted."
He said that the Habib Bank workers would always remember May 10, 2004 as Black-Day. On this date, the so-called non-representative collective bargaining agent (CBA) put its signature on a pay package, which later proved against the interest of the workers.
The new pay package brought increase in the basic salary by six percent. It has provided an increased of Rs 40,000 in the existing ceiling of loan for construction or repair of house by the clerical staff and Rs 30,000 by the non-clerical staff. These concessions are just peanuts, he maintained.
HBWF leader while pointing out distortions in the pay package and the emerging working condition in the bank has asked for reviewing the entire system with a human aspect.
Junaidi strongly criticised the present "non-representative and officials'-backed CBA, which is here for the past 14 years and affecting the interest of the workers.
"Such unions should go," he added saying that mistakes of the past in the name of golden hand shake, coercive methods of removal from jobs and all acts of injustices should be reviewed and corrected.