KARACHI: Employees, govt at oddsover KESC privatization
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Dec 6: Speakers at a rally on Monday, describing the proposed privatization of the KESC as 'detrimental to national interests', demanded that the process be stopped immediately.
The rally was organized by the KESC Employees Action Committee outside the Karachi Press Club. MNA Chaudhry Manzoor of PPP, and KESC labour leaders Latif Mughal, Akhlaq Khan, Aslam Samoon, Usman Baloch, Haji Shehzad and Ayaz Mengal were among those who addressed the rally.
They said that if the privatization process was not called off, they would stage a protest demonstration at the Parliament House in Islamabad so that the rulers could know what the KESC workers wanted.
They reiterated the workers' stand that the losses being suffered by the KESC was mainly owing to the posting of non-professional people who were at the helm of affairs. Instead of privatizing the corporation, they suggested, qualified technical professional be made the KESC chief who would streamline it on sound footings within no time.
They demanded that the present chief executive and other military officers posted in the KESC be sent back to their original posts as they were causing additional financial burden to the public utility.
Besides, they added, the military officials appeared incompetent to bring about an improvement in the working and performance of the corporation because they had never received training to operate a public utility.
The leaders alleged that the government was bent upon privatizing the KESC and this was in line with the IMF directives. The workers expressed the apprehension that the utility might be handed over to some multinational company which, they said, would be detrimental to the national interests.
The speakers also feared that after taking over the corporation, the private party would revise power tariff upward. This, they said, would adversely affect consumers and would indirectly hamper exports as well as local production.
There could be many an industrial units which might not afford the expensive electricity as they faced tough competition in markets. Ultimately, they said, such units would have no option but to stop operating. Such a situation was bound to aggravate unemployment, they added.
The speakers said that the agricultural sector, which got subsidy in power tariff, would also suffer due to the privatization of the KESC as the private operator of the corporation would abolish the subsidy. They demanded that the trade union activities in the KESC be restored so that the rights of the workers could be safeguarded.
They recalled that trade union activities in this organization, Wapda and several other organizations, were banned since many years back. They maintained that the ban was a violation not only of the constitution, but also of various ILO conventions signed by the government.
When the ILO approached the government, the ban was lifted in Wapda and other organizations but it remained imposed in KESC. They demanded that those sacked from KESC under different pretexts be reinstated and those working on the contract basis, daily wages, etc be regularized.
They also urged the government to make operational all power houses and power generating units located at West Wharf, Korangi, Site and other places in the city in order to enable the KESC to become self-reliant.
The speakers pointed out that the latest rally coincided with the final date of bidding (Dec 6) fixed by the Privatization Commission, although the commission had since postponed the final bidding to some other date. But the workers staged the demonstration to register their protest against the privatization.
