hy do people want to be employed? Is it for fun? For time pass? For socialising? Or to add job titles to one’s resume or to impress friends and family? – None of these I suppose. By any definition, employment is a tool to earn, to anchor onto survival, to sustain living. To earn that buying instrument called money, without which we are nothing except, bones, flesh and blood…sans heart, sans mind and in certain circumstances sans conscience. Non-payment of salaries has become a thorny issue lately with the result that the Supreme Court of Pakistan has to take a sou moto notice on one of the cases pertaining to Pilot Colleges Punjab, whose 400 teachers are waiting to get their pays for the last six months. Protest and demonstration by the aggrieved though, did not succeed in waking the employer in this case the Punjab government court orders did at least shake them out of ignorant slumbers. In a similar case 300 teachers of National Education Foundation in Gilgit Baltistan staged a sit in protest, on September 19th 2011, before the Legislative Assembly Secretariat, against the delay in salaries. The growing incident of holding back on employees’ salaries is now true to both private and public sectors. In a simple economic term it explains the crisis of growth, development and opportunities. The whole perspective, of the plight of Pakistan Railways’ 12,000 employees and 2500 pensioner suffering financial hardship, due to non payment of money against their work for the last five months, could be put in a simple sentence “Pakistan Railways in 2011 carried almost the same number of passengers and less freight as it did in 1955.” What else can explain the crisis of growth, development and opportunities if this one example could not?
Money is power
In a recent Seminar on “Attacks on Journalists and Freedom of Media” organized by the Pakistan Media Commission in collaboration with SAFMA Pakistan in Islamabad, concerns against the security of journalists during conflict reporting have been highlighted and discussed thoroughly. If the murder of Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times online bureau chief Pakistan, on May 31 2011, has raised new worries regarding the safety of journalists, it has also taken the lid off the issue of ‘journalistic ethics’ that has been perhaps sidelined, ignored or neglected in the course of action. The seminar was divided into two parts, one a closed door discussion and the other was an open house that was to be addressed by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. During the first half of the seminar, journalistic ethics came under the hammer more than the threat that journalism finds against itself today. There was a loud and clear argument by some veteran journalists that the degeneration in the behaviour of journalists and the rising cases of embedment is an economic issue rather than an issue of violence or terrorism in Pakistan. Most of the large media groups have not only been paying the journalists insufficiently, but for years they have not been paying salaries regularly to their employees at all. There have been salaries pending with the employers for months under one pretext or another. The argument was that low pay coupled with irregular payment mode has sold many of the leading journalists into the abyss of selective reporting whereby publishing or broadcasting material is selected and edited by the one who happens to make the tail wag. The power paradigm has shifted from media owners to the staffers….as the power paradigm has shifted from state to the non state actors in the case of Pakistan. Bad economy has resulted in construed development.
The apathy of millennium
development goal
On the turn of this century, some developmental goals were defined by United Nation General assembly in September 2001 to combat some “Bigger Sins” inflicting developing nations. Almost 189 countries stamped the goals as important indicators of growth and development. All these nations vowed to get away with the “Bigger Sins”: Poverty, illiteracy, gender inequality, child mortality, maternal mortality, AIDs and Malaria, environment hazards, discriminatory trade by 2015. Pakistan being the signatory of this document famously called “Millennium development Goal, have avowed to devalue these sins to an extent that they become tootles! One of the targets has been to reduce maternal and child mortality rate in the country by 2015. According to the Economic survey of Pakistan 2010-2011 mortality rate in infants is reported to be 63.3% while maternal mortality rate is around 89%. Diseases, malnutrition, unhealthy dietary habits and low literacy rate found in women are cited to be the reasons behind the high mortality rate among infants and children under age five. Tracing down the protest staged by Lady Health Workers in Lahore and Peshawar on 15th October 2011, over the issue of non payment of salaries which are due for almost four months now, shows how much importance we attach to this issue. Being the backbone of community welfare, especially when children and women are already the unhealthiest segment of our society, not paying LHWs in times means lapses in vaccinations and in providing caring support to the mother and child during and after pregnancies. These women were baton charged in Lahore by the Police during their protest. There is clear link between health and development. Economic evidence confirms that a 10% improvement in life expectancy at birth is associated with a rise in economic growth of some 0.3-0.4 percentage points a year.
We are heading towards a ‘failed state’
The basic infrastructure of this country depends on them for dependable and reliable operations. In a more literal term an economist would call this an institutional breakdown, a crisis of governance, and a journey toward failed state. “When we are not paying people for what they do for us, are we adding something to the GDP? We are not. We are simply widening the channel of poverty. Already we are 70% into the quagmire of poverty. It is absolutely unacceptable that people who are paid out of the tax payer’s money….the bureaucrat and the whole upper lot… are getting the whole chunk, while the piecemeal is left for the lot that keeps the wheel rolling…the lower administrative staff. If the Chief of Army staff says that 70% of Pakistan’s defence budget is spent on salaries, it means that salary allocation in budgets are made in advance. The same is true with Pakistan government, with a difference that the allotted money goes everywhere except to its rightful place. As I always say, we need to enforce law, and for laws to have power to grab the accusers by tooth and nail, the law enforcers have to be honest, upright and nationalists. Our trade unions, labour laws even the minimum wage board have resigned their fate to the Government. This has to be turned around – hard decisions are due now. Let there be privatisation of Pakistan Railways and its like. Let there be powerful lower courts, the Supreme Court alone cannot dispense the amount of justice the nation requires today. Let there be more taxes coming in by taxing the agriculture sector and netting tight the big forces, aligned to the high-ups. The cost of not paying people against their work increases the transactional cost that has a direct affect on investment. It will ensure more corruption and a dwindling living standard due to income inequality.” says Dr. Qais Aslam a renowned economist of Pakistan.
Lest ‘income inequality’
becomes a beast
America and welfare states all over the world give “employee insurance” coverage to their unemployed citizens, falling into this category either due to frictional or structural unemployment. The idea behind providing this safety net is not to mend the heartbreaks that follow any layoff, or job denial, but to keep the phenomenon of income inequality restricted to its boundaries. What happened on 17 September 2011 NYC in the form of “Occupy Wall Street” is a reflection of a long drawn out idea that people do not take things lying down especially when one segment is thriving financially right under the nose of the other almost crippled with inflationary pressures, unemployment and low self esteem. Happened to be leaderless yet organised, causing a ripple across Europe, such a disciplined demonstration is presently not an idea that Pakistani citizens can pursue, though they are more pressured and left out. However the tendency of an outbreak more uncivilised and barbaric cannot be overruled…
In his latest statement Federal Minister for Professional and Technical Training Mian Riaz Pirzada said that “unemployment in Pakistan has risen to 18 per cent, when a major portion of Pakistan population belongs to the working age. He went on saying 70 per cent of non agriculture worker force is employed in the informal sector, engaged in low skilled low quality forms of employment. He added, “We are inept at training people and lack the infrastructure as well as the will to meet the skilled labour definition delineated by the industry.”
So it is a lose-lose game as far as the labour market of Pakistan is concerned….no salaries, no skill, no law and no institutions to fall back on – no wonder the country is among the most corrupt nations of the world as often reminded by Transparency International. When there would not be a right way to get money, people will use any way to make money. The difference between getting money and making makes all the difference.
“Durdana Najam is a freelance financial feature writer, currently doing MPhil in Governance and Public Policy, from FC College Lahore, she could be reached at [email protected]”
