Power loom: Workers stage demo for better wages

FAISALABAD:

Scores of power loom workers affiliated with the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM) on Tuesday came together at a protest demonstration to press for better wages.

The demonstrators gathered at Jhang Road and staged a sit-in near the Saddar Bypass Chowk. The protestors blocked the thoroughfare for vehicular traffic. Power Looms Workers’ Union Saddar president Malik Fazal Elahi said that the government had announced a raise of Rs1,000 in labourers’ monthly wages in the budget. He said factory proprietors had “thrown the government’s notification in the dustbin.”

Elahi said factory owners had locked workers out of their factories and fired them when they demanded their wages to be raised in line with the notification.

He said the union had complained in this regard to district authorities and the Labour Department but to no avail. Elahi said no action had been taken on this account. He said some of the workers and their families had been “starving” for 10 days.

The demonstrators raised slogans against factory proprietors and demanded the units to be immediately unlocked.

The protestors also demanded payment of wages in line with the government’s notification. They threatened to launch a protest campaign of greater intensity “if their legitimate demands were not accepted.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 19^th, 2015.