HYDERABAD: A large number of trade unions and the home-based workers federation protested here on Friday against petrol price hike, forcible retrenchment of workers, and shortage of water and electricity.

Activists of the Home-based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF) and National Trade Union Federation Pakistan (NTUF) organised the protest on the call of the NTUF and Haqooq-i-Khalq Movement outside the local press club.

NTUF senior vice president Mehboob Qureshi and HBWWF vice-president Shakeel Khan said that rising petrol prices, forced layoffs, and power and water shortages proved that the country was under the complete control of an anti-people mafia and a fully-fledged public movement was needed to defeat them.

They said that even before the annual budget was passed, the government had imposed a mini-budget prepared by “anti-people mafia”. The government had robbed people’s money by increasing the prices of petroleum products by 25 to 60 per cent in a “criminal” manner while holding the legal system in abeyance, they said.

The petroleum mafia in the government had made billions of rupees overnight, which had multiplied the impact of rising inflation, they said. The petroleum mafia got courage when the sugar and flour mafia, which also had earned billions of rupees through illegal means, got off scot-free, they observed.

They said the country was already suffering from the worst economic crisis due to the International Monetary Fund-led policies, but the incompetent government had made the crisis worse with its negative actions. More than six million workers had lost their jobs in the past six months while it was feared that more than 18 million workers would lose jobs in the coming days.

They said the situation had forced more than 50pc of the country’s population to live below the poverty line.

They said that most of the families of workers were suffering from malnutrition and starvation while the government, despite all claims, had completely failed to provide timely and immediate assistance to labourers affected by Covid-19.

They demanded of the government to withdraw record increase in petroleum prices, bring the mafia involved in this crime to justice, scale up salaries and pensions of workers, reinstate all fired workers and provide social protection to all citizens under the universal social security system.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2020