KARACHI, May 25: Workers of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company on Wednesday stayed away from work in protest against what now seems to be imminent privatization of the phone utility. Bidding for a 26 per cent controlling stake in PTCL will go ahead on June 10, government officials announced on Wednesday, after seven out of nine potential bidders showed up for a pre-bid meeting.

Determined to thwart the government’s plans, union leaders said their concerted “pen-down and tool-down strike” would cause total chaos in all the PTCL exchanges across the country, adversely affecting even cellphone communication. They threatened to resort to “extreme measures” if their demands remained unmet.

The various unions of the PTCL demand that the government-owned telecommunications company is not privatized, new pay scales are introduced and contractual employees are regularized.

Sources told Dawn that the customer services department of the PTCL, already under fire for being not as responsive to complaints as it should be, would be worst hit if low-ranking staff, such as linemen and sub-divisional officers, stayed away from work for long.

They conceded that work in many exchanges came to a standstill when PTCL workers went on strike for three hours on Monday and Tuesday.

“Alarm bells have started to ring in the PTCL because a large number of complaints of faulty phone lines have not been attended to because of the ongoing strike,” they said.

They recalled that PTCL workers went on strike on Monday when talks between the collective bargaining agent and the managements remained inconclusive. The talks continued in Islamabad till the filing of this report.

However, a high-ranking official of the PTCL, requesting anonymity, said adequate fallback arrangements had been made to ensure that phone complaints were attended to as quickly as possible. He said it was well known that quite a few PTCL workers did not work as efficiently as they should and the PTCL managements was used to working with conscientious staff.