September 24, 2002	Tuesday	Rajab 16, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, Sept 23: The PPP candidate from NA-48, Nayyar Hussain Bukhari, has said if elected, he will lift ban on labour unions in all government and semi-government institutions.

He was speaking at a meeting with trade union leaders from different parts of the city at the PPP Central Secretariat on Monday.

“The PPP was the first political party which acknowledged the power of labour unions and provided them an opportunity to get stronger and play their role in decision-making of their respective organizations,” he said.

He said this gave a serious blow to the interests of the capitalist class. He expressed his concern about the way “labourers were being treated by their employers, wherein they had no right or facility at all”.

He said: “PPP is in fact a party of labourers, peasants and all the poor people of the country. We assure them that we will get them their rights and stop their exploitation.”

Chaudhry Rabnawaz, the candidate of Tehrik-i-Insaf from NA- 49, while speaking at corner meetings in different villages of the capital, expressed his concern over the way “skilled and unskilled people were being deprived of their jobs in the name of the downsizing”.

He said the “state is in fact an institution of public welfare, and is supposed to take care of the citizens’ needs and provide them security of every kind, including security of their jobs”.

He criticized the foreign donor agencies and lamented that the rulers of the past “blindly pursued their dictates”. He promised to re-instate into service all those “educated and skilled government employees whose services were terminated by successive governments in the past”.

The PML-N candidate for NA-48, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, while speaking at a corner-meeting in G-7, expressed his concern over the price hike and the repeated increase in tariff of utility services.

The government, he said, had claimed that it had controlled line losses in Wapda and would not increase power tariff in future.