‘Make minimum wage Rs 15,000’

Labour Party Pakistan (LPP) will stage a sit-in for indefinite period at the Charing Cross on Tuesday (today) at 5:00 pm. LPP is demanding a 100-percent increase in labourers’ salaries, a decrease in price hike and eradication of load shedding. The LPP spokesman Farooq Tariq along with other organizations’ representatives made the sit-in’s announcement during a press conference at the Lahore Press Club on Monday. Tariq announced that labourers would bring out a rally from GPO Chowk to the Charing Cross and would perform a sit-in until the acceptance of their demands. Thousands of workers from more than 26 trade unions including LPP, All Pakistan Clerical Staff association (APCA), All Pakistan Paramedical Staff Federation (APPMSF), National Organisation of Postal Employees (NOPE), Muttahida Workers Alliance, Railway Workers Union, People’s Cares Foundation and others would join the sit-in.
The LPP spokesman said that the rally would be a referendum against the labour policies that were not formed keeping in view the needs and liabilities of the country’s labour. He said that the federal finance minister had had meetings with traders, multinationals and industrialists to get their proposals for the upcoming budget but he did not bother to contact the main stakeholders; labourers, to get their suggestions.
He said that it was not for the first time when the government ignored labour; proposals of the labour representatives were ignored during the process of national and provincial budget making too. He said instead of proposing a salary raise for millions of labours in the upcoming budget, government was planning to levy new Rs 200 billion taxes. There was also a proposal to expand the general sales tax that would bring another wave of price hike, he said, alleging that the government was following the ‘anti-masses policies’ of IMF, WB and other international monitory organizations.
Tariq said that rulers were loading new taxes on the already suppressed masses instead of taking the capitalists into the national tax net. He demanded of the government to increase the minimum wages of labour from Rs 7,000 to Rs 15,000 in the new budget. Tariq urged the government to refuse paying back all foreign loans as Pakistan had already paid the principal amount by only paying the interest on the debts that amount to more than $ 50 billion.