ISLAMABAD, Jan 17: The process of increasing the minimum monthly wages of workers from Rs2,500 to Rs3,000 has hit snags as the government has postponed a number of meetings scheduled with the Workers and Employers Bilateral Council of Pakistan (WEBCoP), allegedly on pressure from industrialists.

Official sources told Dawn that Monday's scheduled meeting of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz with the WEBCoP, which is to forward its recommendations on the minimum wages, did not take place, apparently because of a meeting of the federal cabinet.

Earlier, another such meeting could not take place as the prime minister had to fly to Egypt to attend Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's funeral, the sources said. The sources attributed the lack of progress on the issue to increasing pressures from industrialists who wanted to delay the matter as much as possible.

Ironically, even the existing minimum salary of Rs2,500 is not being paid by most of the industrial units in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Most of these mills have recruited workers on Rs1,800 a month.

"The enhancement of minimum wages from Rs2,500 to Rs3,000 is likely to take longer than it was expected as the government has given no deadline to the WEB CoP to forward its recommendations for finalizing modalities of the matter," officials said.

The WEBCoP, presumably an employer-dominated body, could delay the matter by months in the absence of a timeframe, the officials feared. President Musharraf on Dec 27 announced that the government had decided, in principle, to enhance the minimum wages of industrial workers to Rs3,000.

He had said that a final decision would be taken after negotiations between the government and WEBCoP representatives. Workers across the country had expressed dismay and frustration over the announcement as they had demanded Rs4,000 as minimum wages.

Within hours of the president's announcement, Labour and Manpower Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan had said at a press conference that the matter would be finalized by the second week of January. According to the Labour Policy, 2002, the government is bound to increase the minimum wages in 2003. However, it failed to do so.