Taking exception: PESCO workers protest against management

PESHAWAR:

Employees of Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) have again started protests and strikes against the company’s management for cutting their bonus salaries and stalling their up-gradation.

Employees have set up a protest camp under the umbrella of All Pakistan Wapda Hydroelectric Workers Union within the premises of the Pesco head office in Peshawar. Offices in other districts of the province have also been shut in protest and will remain closed for three consecutive days.

Protesters have blocked the entrance of the main building of Pesco’s head office in the city and have put up placards and banners around the camp where hundreds of employees are chanting slogans against the Board of Directors (BoD).

“The protest is not only in Peshawar. It is being held across the entire province,” said Gohar Ali Gohar, the union’s information secretary who was welcoming groups of protesters from Shabqadar, Charsadda, Mardan, Swat and Dargai on Monday. “We want the BoD to be dissolved because it is a political, incompetent and dishonest panel.”

Besides shouting slogans against the management, protesters were also swaying along to songs played by a disc jockey. Others were reciting Pashto poetry.

On a different note, the union’s general secretary for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Mustajab Mazdooryar, condemned the recent killings of labourers in Balochistan and Afghanistan, demanding Rs2.5 million as compensation for the family of each victim. Mazdooryar also decried the government’s policy of privatisation, calling it an ‘anti-workers’ move.

“For the welfare of the people of the country, we will not let anybody privatise Wapda,” he said, adding it destroyed PTCL and would do the same to Wapda.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2015.