KARACHI, Jan 31: Employees of United Bank have demanded that their salaries be revised and brought on a par with those of other nationalized banks.

At a press conference here on Thursday, leaders of the United Bank Employees Union of Pakistan said they had submitted their charter of demand to the management urging it to revise their salaries.

They said the last time salaries were partially revised in July 2001 and the management had promised to revise these completely in January 2002, but it had not yet done so.

Citing some details of the July revision, they said through that revision in many allowances — such as education, washing, discomfort, overtime, unattractive, double duty, hill allowances, etc — was not done and even the loans for house building, motorcycle, etc. were not increased and it had been promised that these would be increased in January this year.

They said the bank had even withdrawn the medical facilities available to the parents of workers, and the list of diseases for which hospitalization was allowed had been brought down from 13 to six.

They said the management was even putting a condition that those workers who wanted to avail of the pension facility would have to accept the basic pay under the July 2001 agreement.

They urged the government that since the bank was to be privatized soon, the management resolve the issue of workers’ salary so that the new management, after privatization, would not have to face any problems with the workers.

Wahab Baloch, M. Mohammed Husain, M. Saghir Khan, Saleem Shaikh and others also spoke at the press conference.