Founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is credited with introducing the first labour policy in the country and the PPP’s previous Sindh government adopted a tripartite arrangement to review and update the same policy.
This was stated by an aide to the Sindh chief minister, Waqar Mehdi, who is serves as the PPP Sindh general secretary, as he spoke at a programme organised by the Peoples Labour Bureau at Peoples Secretariat on Sunday evening.
Mehdi said that labourers were the backbone of both Pakistan and the PPP. He added that labourers in the country had to massively suffer whenever dictators or ‘selected’ regimes came into power. He remarked that the rulers who had come into power through undemocratic means had been in the habit of ignoring the demands of labourers.
The labourers suffered the most in the undemocratic regimes because of hike in the prices of essential products, unemployment, poverty, lawlessness, and exploitation caused by the regressive policies of the dictators, he maintained.
The CM’s aide said a previous Sindh government of the PPP under the tripartite arrangement had involved representatives of employers, labourers and government representatives in the consultation process to adopt a new labour policy.
Mehdi said the Benazir Mazdoor Card had emerged as another gift of the PPP’s Sindh government to the labourers belonging to both formal and informal sectors. He said the PPP was a representative party of the labourers that in every regime had struggled for upholding the cause of welfare, progress and fulfilment of the rights of the workers.
He vowed that the PPP would continue with its struggle to end all forms of exploitation of the labourers at the hands of the exploitative system in the country. A day earlier, Sindh government spokesperson Barrister Murtaza Wahab on Sunday said that on May 1, 1886, workers and labourers had made an indelible mark by sacrificing their lives for their rights.
“The Pakistan Peoples Party [PPP] and the Sindh government salute the greatness of the workers and the labourers who have a pivotal role in the development of the cities of Sindh, especially Karachi,” he said in a message issued in connection with International Workers’ Day. He also said the provincial government will continue to fight for the protection of workers’ jobs and their rights.