The contractual employees of the Population Census Organisation on Monday appealed to the chief justice of Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to regularise them and give them job security. Protesting on the Sher Shah Suri Road, the demonstrators were holding placards inscribed with their demands. The organisation’s employees told reporters that 1044 candidates had been appointed on contractual basis in 2008 across the country, and that they had been performing their duties honestly for the last four years. They mentioned a government letter which stated that after June 30, 2012, the organisation would be merged into a new body, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, and the contractual employees would be laid off. They quoted cases in which contractual employees had been regularised. They said that employees of the Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) who had been terminated in 2005 were reappointed in 2008 on court’s orders, while the prime minister regularised 218 FBS employees in 2011.
