Around 700 employees of Rescue 1122 have not received their salaries for the last six months despite being under-training since June last year, Pakistan Today has learnt.
Although according to the rules of Punjab government all government employees are eligible to get paid while being under-training, the procedure under-practice in Rescue 1122 is a rather complex one.
The verification of the documentation of the Rescue 1122 employees usually takes around 9 months, much more than the usual time taken by other departments. During this time the employees are not given any salary. The same happens to employees who are being trained for a promotion.
A Rescue 1122 source told Pakistan Today that this was not the only problem being faced by the Rescue 1122 employees.
“When a normal government employee goes for training in order to get a promotion, he or she is trained according to the level of his or her seniority. However, when a Rescue 1122 employee goes for training, he is trained from scratch. And during this training, the verification of documents is done all over again, due to which the employees are not given any salary for almost 9 months,” he said.
He added that most of the Rescue 1122 employees had refused to get a promotion as “they know that this would mean no salary for nine months”.
“Does the CCPO go through the same training to become an IG which he went through when he was being recruited as an ASP? Then why is this being done to Rescue 1122 employees,” he said.
He said how the government expected of the people to run their houses without salary.
“Do they want us to borrow money from our friends for nine months in a time when the inflation rate is touching the sky,” he said.
He added that the Rescue 1122 employees were also not given any days off until they managed to find someone to replace themselves.
“The administration should manage replacements itself, not us. It is their duty. And if they are short of personnel, they should start hiring,” he said.
A Rescue 1122 employee, on the condition of anonymity, told Pakistan Today said it was very difficult to work when you are not being paid.
“When a person is not sure how his or her family will get dinner, how does the government expect that they would do their work efficiently,” he said.
He appealed to the government that their misery should be addressed so that getting a promotion becomes a source of joy rather than a menace for them.
Rescue 1122 director general, when contacted, said that he was working on the salaries issue of the employees.
“We will compensate them. The bill has already being sent to the authorities and will soon be implemented,” he said.
In reply to a question, he said that they had informed the finance department regarding the salaries of the workers who were being trained and soon they would be compensated.
“Workers would not have to get training from the very beginning as we were adding new tasks into their training plan. The training programmes are being improved in order to compete with internationals standards,” he said.
The DG said that as the service was a 24 hour duty, issues regarding leaves and allowance would always be there.
“We always try to compensate them, but if any emergency occurs, we have to call them due to shortage of staff,” he said.
