KARACHI, Nov 25: Speakers at a meeting here on Saturday demanded lifting of ban on trade unions activities in all organisations and repealing of all anti-labour laws for the restoration and protection of workers’ due rights.

The meeting was organised by the Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign (PTUDC) at the Karachi Press Club.

The speakers included PTUDC chief Chaudhry Manzoor Ahmed (MNA), Riaz Ahsan, Rafiq Jarwar, Liaquat Solangi, Manzoor Razi, Liaquat Sahi, Shaikh Majeed, Shahbaz Phulpoto and Hameeda Ghanghro.

They stressed on rolling back the privatization policy, and called for renationalising all the industrial units privatised so far and reinstating all the laid off workers immediately.

They criticised the government banning employees’ unions and association, most recently in the education department, terming the action ‘a violation of fundamental rights’, guaranteed not only under the Constitution but also by various international conventions signed by the government. The labour leaders expressed strong reservations for the Industrial Relations Ordinance-2002 and demanding its immediate withdrawal, indicating that the ordinance had been rejected by all representative trade unions of the country. They called for the implementation of a new IRO based on the inputs from genuine labour leaders to ensure protection of workers’ rights.

The speakers also criticised the rule relating to financial institutions and leading to the retrenchment of thousands of workers from such institutions. The strongly demanded repeal of the rule and called for reinstatement of the workers sacked under it.

They alleged that the government on the pretext of downsizing, rightsizing, golden handshake, voluntary separation, etc., was rendering hundreds of thousands of workers jobless. Coupled with ever increasing inflation, the retrenchment on a mass scale resulted in high unemployment rate and badly affected the poor class, which formed majority of the country’s population, they observed.