Trade union leader Bashir Bakhtiar paid tributes

LAHORE
Veteran trade union leader and one of the founders of the Trade Union Movement of Pakistan Bashir Ahmed Bakhtiar spent his whole life defending and promoting fundamental rights of the workers and struggling for independence from the British along with the Father of the Nation. That was reason that he was given Punjab Provincial Assembly seat reserved for labour in the pre-independence days by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
These views were expressed in a National General Body Session of All Pakistan Wapda Hydro Electric Workers Union outside Bakhtiar Labour Hall on Wednesday which was chaired by Abdul Latif Nizamani and attended by thousands of union delegates from all parts of the country.
The session was addressed by general secretary of the union Khurshid Ahmed who appealed to the working class of Pakistan to continue to strengthen their unity to establish an egalitarian society free from exploitation. He expressed apathy of the present government that despite repeated demonstrations by Wapda workers all over the country against the proposed privatisation of electricity, the government had not entered into dialogue with the workers in conformity with ILO Conventions. He demanded that the government should introduce far reaching economic reforms to provide cheaper hydel and coal fired thermal power to provide cheaper electricity and without loadshedding of electricity to the citizens.
At this occasion, the house by a resolution pointed that the present government had resorted to the privatisation of the national public utilities. It was demanded to introduce administrative reforms to the electricity system to raise its efficiency without political interference instead of privatising it unilaterally.
The conference was addressed by justice (retd) Tanveer Ahmed and IA Rehman, Secretary General of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Badar-ul-Munir Murtaza, member (Power) Wapda, Saeed Ahmed, General Manager (HRM), Pepco, and Rubina Jameel, President of Pakistan Workers Confederation, Akbar Ali Khan Additional Secretary, and Yousuf Baloch Chairman, Osama Tariq Secretary, Ch Muhammad Anwar, president Railway Workers Union, Javaid Ahmed and other representatives of All Pakistan Workers Confederation. They paid tribute to the dedicated services of Bashir Ahmed Bakhtiar and declared that no society could progress without recognising and implementing the rights of the workers. By another resolution, the house urged the prime minister to get recovered 200 billion dollars deposited by feudal lords and politicians in the Swiss Bank and get imposed upon tax law upon the non-taxable elites instead of privatising of public utilities and introduce administrative reforms to raise their productivity and get stopped recruitment of new hands on the political nepotism in the electricity.