LAHORE: Labour organisations on Saturday demanded that the government provide free vaccine, wage and employment to workers during the coronavirus pandemic.Pakistan Railway Labour Union and Red Workers Front organised a seminar at Lahore Railway Desil Shed where All Pakistan Railway Trade Union Alliance central president Mian Mahmood Nangyana said workers were facing the worst conditions due to the coronavirus related lockdowns but governments were not providing vaccine and health facilities to them. Side by side, he said, workers were being sacked in millions.
Red Workers Front central leader Adam Pal said that the lockdowns in the country had affected the workers with the disease, shortage of food, unemployment and unavailability of vaccines.
He said other countries were providing free vaccines to the workers but our government first delayed buying the vaccines and later allowed the private sector to sell the vaccines.
About the wages of workers, he said a majority of the countries had not only provided wages to employees but they also helped the private sector to provide wages and food to their workers during lockdowns.
He said the World Bank report about Pakistan revealed that below the poverty line ratio in Pakistan rose from three percent to 10 and around 20 million people lost their jobs due to lockdowns. Around 5,000 workers were laid off from Pakistan Steel Mill and government were planning to remove 35,000 others workers from Railways, he said.Also, a joint statement was initiated by the Southeast Asian Left, and endorsed by organisations from within and outside Southeast Asia region, which stated after more than a year of the Covid-19 pandemic, working people around the world have been suffering and victimized by the global capitalist system that failed to protect people’s lives and livelihood. The pandemic has unleashed the severe economic recession around the world, with an increasing number of people losing their jobs or suffering from reduced income. The crisis is deepening social inequalities and injustices.
The deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus has caused the Covid-19 pandemic that infected over 150 million people and took over three million lives around the world, but the savage capitalist virus that feeds on the exploitation of labour and natural resources has deepened the impact of the global health crisis and ruined the lives of millions.
At the same time, governments in many countries, including those in Southeast Asia, have been using the pretext of containing the spread of the virus to increase their authoritarian control and to dismantle democratic spaces to increase their grip on power.The statement has a set of demands, including starting a free universal healthcare service for all ending the vaccine apartheid by dismantling the monopoly of big pharmaceutical companies on drug patents in order to guarantee universal access to vaccine and essential medicines for all countries.
The other demands include job security with income security, a guaranteed basic income and social protection for all, a programme to enhance food security to protect the livelihood of small local farmers, a cancellation of odious debts imposed on governments of the Global South, and an end to the unilateral criminal sanctions imposed by the imperialist powers (especially the United States) on countries which are not in line with their interests, including Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.
Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2021