PESHAWAR, Aug 20: Thousands of workers of the Bara Ittehad Silk Industries have gone on strike against what they call exploitative tactics of the silk factory owners.

Taking to Dawn here on Wednesday, office bearers of the workers’ association of the Bara Ittehad Silk Industries, Khyber Agency, said that owing to exploitative tactics of the owners, they were forced to starve.

Some 12,000 workers have been working in 150 silk industries since 1975 on contractual basis. When factories produce excessive silk and the owners do not find any market for it, they collaborate with Wapda officials to carry out long spells of loadshedding to deprive the workers of their jobs.

The workers said that factories operated only for four hours a day which earned them a meagre amount of only Rs30 per person.

They added that recently the water and power minister inaugurated a new grid station and there was no shortage of electricity in the region.

Most factory owners were from Punjab and were not ready to talk to the protesters, they said. The workers appealed to the NWFP Governor Iftikhar Hussain Shah to look into the matter.