ISLAMABAD: The Establishment Division has written a letter to all the ministries and divisions asking them to move cases of all contractual employees for the regularisation of their services.

The decision has revived the hopes of thousands of employees who have been working for years on daily wages but are yet to be regularised.

There are tens of thousands of employees working in different ministries and divisions of the federal capital on daily wages, contractual or as labours.

The letter dated Aug 9 and available with Dawn stated that the terms and conditions of civil servants were governed under the provisions of Civil Servants Act 1973 and rules made thereunder. According to Section 6 of the Civil Servant Act 1973, every appointment other than ad hoc shall be on probation. Section 7 of the Act also provides that a person appointed on probation shall on satisfactory completion of his probation is eligible for confirmation.

Thousands of employees working on contract, daily wages or as labourers will benefit from decision of Establishment Division

“It has been brought to the notice of the Establishment Division that ministries/divisions/departments are not processing the cases of confirmation in respect to their employees which needs immediate attention of the ministries/division,” the letter stated.

All the ministries/attached departments/subordinate offices have been directed to initiate the cases of confirmation in respect of the employees working under their administrative control.

A daily wage teacher told Dawn that they had struggled for the regularisation of their services for over five years.

“We held protest demonstrations, took classes while wearing black armbands and used all possible means, including filing court cases, but without any success. The process of regularisation, which had started during the tenure of the PPP government, was stopped by the previous PML-N government,” he said.

“During our protests, PTI MNA Asad Umar supported us and a number of times participated in our protests. We believe that he would play his role in the regularisation of our services,” he said.

During the last five years, the regularisation of the daily wage employees belonging to different ministries and attached departments and hospitals was also taken up by standing committees of the parliament.

A doctor of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) cardiac centre said because of the non-regularisation of services he and other doctors could not get salaries for over 30 months.

“We got salaries after the intervention of the Supreme Court but the issue of our regularisation is yet to be addressed. We hope that now the management will move our cases,” he said.

Pims’ Executive Director Dr Raja Amjad said the staff members of the bone marrow transplant and cardiac centres had been suffering.

“As we were not authorised to regularise the doctors, the cases were moved to the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC). However, after getting the letter from the Establishment Division I will see if they can be regularised without involving the FPSC,” he said.

In 2011, the then prime minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani announced that all the contractual employees would be regularised. This was followed by the formation of a committee that started the process of regularisation. However, the process was stopped when the tenure of the PPP government expired. By then, thousands of daily wage employees were regularised.

Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2018