July 20, 2008	Sunday	Rajab 16, 1429

HYDERABAD, July 19: Strike in the offices of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) continued on Saturday in protest against introduction of unified pay scale (UPS) scheme by the management.

Pakistan Telecommunication Employees Union (PTEU) CBA’s central deputy chief organiser Shakeel Ahmed Khan, central joint secretary Shafi Mallah and central vice-chairman Ghaffar Shaikh said at a workers’ gathering that the UPS scheme was a threat to job security of regular employees.

They would not like to be governed by the private company’s rules as per agreement between the union and the management and vowed to continue strike till their demands were accepted, they said

They said that at the time of PTCLs’ privatisation it had been agreed that no regular employee would be retrenched or his cadre changed. They demanded that services of all the contract employees should be regularised.

Shakeel Ahmed Khan said that secretary general of PTEU Rana Hassan had sent the details of their demands to PTCL’s human resource department.

In Tando Mohammad Khan, workers locked PTCL offices and staged a token hunger strike.

PTCL workers have been on strike since July 16 against introduction of UPS scheme which they believe is aimed at changing cadre of all the employees from basic pay scale (BPS) to UPS.

They believed that once they signed the consent forms for UPS they would be treated like contract employees although they were regular employees.