KARACHI, Aug 8: Speakers at a meeting on Sunday demanded that controversial anti-worker laws, including the Industrial Relations Ordinance-2002, be abolished immediately.

Speaking at the meeting, organized by the Habib Bank Workers' Front at Metroveille in Site, they further demanded that the Section 27-B of the Banking Companies Ordinance-1962, and Section 2-A of the Services Tribunal Act-1973, besides other such anti-worker laws be abolished.

The front's chief Habibuddin Junaidi, Fazal Karim, Zafar Iqbal, Nadira Perveen, Mohammad Yaqoob, Nasir Mehmood, Ashraf Baloch, Rehman Afridi, Ghaffar Junejo, Khalid Shehzad, and others also spoke on the occasion.

They said that the government in the past few years had formulated banking industry-specific, anti-worker laws, owing to which the trade unions in the banks had been crippled, leading to mass-scale sacking on different pretexts like golden handshake, right-sizing and down-sizing etc.

They claimed that just in past three years over 700,000 workers had been sacked from banks and other organizations, further worsening the unemployment situation in the country.

They said that when the front was the collective bargaining agent (CBA) it had arranged employment for a large number of people in the bank, while over 14,000 workers had been sacked on different pretexts from the bank in just past three years when the front was not the CBA.

They said that whenever the referendum was held and the front became CBA, it would ensure security of employment for the workers. Senior labour leader Habibuddin Junedi, speaking on the occasion said that the real representative trade unions of workers had been ruined through discriminate legislation, as a part of a planned conspiracy, which was aimed at suppressing any voice for worker's rights.