PCSIR employees to review protest plan today

Engineers, scientists considering strike to press demand for pay raise.

LAHORE: Scientists and engineers in the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (PCSIR) will meet today to decide whether to step up their protest for pay raises and go on strike.

“The pay we are receiving right now makes it imperative that we stand and fight,” said a senior engineer and a leading member of the Employees Action Committee. He said the committee would decide what further action to take, including the possibility of a strike.

After recent protests in Lahore, the PCSIR issued a notice barring employees from speaking to the press.

The engineer said that PCSIR employees were promised a 50 per cent pay raise like other federal government employees and a 15 per cent increase in their medical allowance. “The federal government has not allowed the funds to be released,” he said. “The situation with pay is really dire and has turned into a crisis.”

He said that engineers and scientists with years of education and experience were barely able to make ends meet on their salaries.

Permanent employees in BPS-17 earn around Rs16,000 a month, he said.

Another engineer said the employees had given the government many opportunities to meet their demand for increased pay and benefits.

“After the floods we shunned civil disobedience, but now the situation has changed,” he said. “We will take to the streets.”

The Lahore PCSIR office has around 600-700 permanent employees and some 350-400 participated in an hour-long protest on Ferozepur Road on October 10. The Employees Action Committee was formed on October 2 after protests in Karachi and Lahore. The latter was a small protest of some 150 employees at the PCSIR gate next to Gadaffi Stadium, said the senior engineer.

A scientist told The Express Tribune that the situation had been exacerbated by the fact that employees received their most recent salary 8-9 days late. He said that the PCSIR was a critical institution for the country as it trained and provided research facilities for graduate and post-graduate students.

He accused the Ministry of Science and Technology of ignoring the PCSIR employees’ demands.

Other employees told The Express Tribune that they thought the director general of PCSIR supported their demands and had attended the protests.

A high-level administrator who reports directly to the director general said that his boss had taken the issue to the government, but the problem was that there simply wasn’t enough money to give them a pay raise.

He added: “We are not taking any action against the employees because we understand their discontentment after not receiving the raises.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 18^th, 2010.