Saturday, October 9, 2010

UBL's sacked workers seek reinstatement

Published: February 16, 2010



ISLAMABAD - The retrenched employees of UBL whose services were terminated in the second regime of Nawaz Sharif while seeking their early reinstatement held a protest demonstration in front of the Parliament House.

The protesters said that in 1997, the political government of Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) unilaterally terminated them without issuing show cause notice as well as any prior intimation in a bid to politically victimise them.

On November 15, 1997 the slain PPP leader Benazir Bhutto while supporting their stance at a rally of thousands of people in Karachi had said that the forced termination of the UBL employees was equal to their economic murder and she would reinstate all those after coming to power.

But, while criticising the incumbent ruling party, they said that in spite of the fact that all the sacked employees during the period 1997 had been reinstated through a Presidential Ordinance yet the UBL employees were unable to benefit from the ordinance. “The government had formed a reinstatement committee including Federal Minister for Labour and Manpower Khurshid Shah, Federal Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources Syed Naveed Qamar and Federal Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs Shaukat Tarin, but the committee had done nothing except holding meetings,” they added.

The committee had held its last meeting on January 11, this year but the minutes of the meeting were not publicly announced keeping their fate hanging in balance, they regretted. They warned that Khurshid Shah in a personal meeting with the UBL Retrenched Officers Association had promised on January 9 to re-employ them in the National Bank of Pakistan as according to him UBL had been privatised but nothing was done in that connection. The protesters said that they had been facing severe economic problems since the last 12 years and were compelled to live in severe abysmal conditions as the government had paid them a meagre amount of money at the time of termination. The protesters vowed to continue protests till their reinstatement or re-employment.

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