Last week, thousands of sanitary workers employed with the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC) observed strike and stayed away from work for several days. The city roads were left unattended, with heaps of garbage all around. In the absence of sanitary workers, the LWMC had to employ mechanical cleaners and vehicles to collect the waste.
The worker leaders say they were perturbed by certain measures taken by the company and joined the strike voluntarily. On the other hand, the LWMC claims far less than 1,000 workers who were uncomfortable with the newly introduced foolproof system of attendance called the shots and compelled other workers not to perform their duty.
There were sit-ins in different parts of the city including the one on Egerton Road where the participants were also addressed by the former federal minister for minorities J Salik, who told them the government wanted to privatise the utility and lay off as many people as it could through different tactics.
Though the workers had several reservations, their most immediate concern was the introduction of a digital attendance system and heavy deductions from their salaries even if they were only 15 minutes late to work.
However, the LWMC officials say there is no hidden agenda and they only want to discourage absenteeism, impersonation and corruption in the department through the best use of technology.
Explaining the system, General Manager (GM), Human Resource (HR) and Admin, LWMC, Shahid Farooq says the company has given android phones to all its supervisors in all the union councils of the city. These phones have customised applications and softwares installed in them.
A supervisor is required to reach the meeting point in his union council and take and upload a picture of the sanitary workers who gather there for attendance at 6am. The same exercise is repeated at 2pm when their duty hours end. A worker who is not there in both these pictures is marked absent for the day. Anybody who is present in one of these pictures is supposed to be present partially and has to forgo half of his/her salary for the day.
There is no possibility of foul play as the Global Position System (GPS) detects the exact location where the picture is taken as well as the time when this activity takes place.
The thousands of LWMC workers did not have any idea of the heavy toll the new system would have on their pockets till the time their salaries were ready. They were shocked to find that huge amounts had been deducted from their salaries.
"There were many who had worked throughout the month and were late only by a few minutes for the ‘photo sessions’ on some occasions," says Mushtaq Aasi, President, Lahore Sanitary Workers’ Union (LSWU).
Aasi says some union areas are "so big in size that the workers have to travel miles to reach the meeting points.
"Sometimes they are working on the farthest end of their union councils and have to rush to reach the meeting point to mark attendance at the end of their shift. This is counter-productive as workers have to leave the work they are doing half-way and rush to their offices."
Aasi also questions the logic of deducting half salary just because somebody was missing from the "photo sessions."
His point is that there should be a system in place to judge whether a person missed work for half the day or simply the attendance session so that deductions could be made judiciously. "Who will work for the entire day after missing an attendance session in the morning? He will simply come at the end of the shift, get himself photographed and claim half of the salary for that day."
Shahid Farooq, on the other hand, is convinced that the existing system is the best available in the market to check absenteeism and the incidence of ghost workers. He says countless cases had been detected where manual registers were maintained by daroghas who marked the presence of the workers according to their will.
"They can mark a month’s attendance for a worker in advance or mark the regular workers as absent if they are not happy with them," Farooq adds. "There were many who never worked and visited their offices just to collect their salaries."
The new system entails that the attendance record is uploaded on video screen at the LWMC office early in the morning so that alternative arrangements can be made in union councils where the attendance is low. The video screen installed in the office displays a map showing percentage of workers present in different union councils.
Shahid Farooq says the company considered options to introduce biometric attendance machines but that would be too costly. Similarly, the workers were given smart cards with bar codes to mark attendances but this also did not work out well as some supervisors were caught read-handed carrying cards of dozens of workers. It was suspected that they charged the workers for swiping their cards on their behalf in their absence.
He also says the workers and the LWMC have reached an agreement under which they have resumed work and the company has agreed to fulfill several of the workers’ demands. For example, the women sanitary workers will be photographed by female supervisors only, the contract workers will be regularised, unjustified deductions from salaries will be adjusted, union workers will be allowed entry to the LWMC and the Solid Waste Management (SWM) department offices and so on.
Mushtaqi Aasi, however, is not satisfied with the progress on the issue and says the terms of the agreement have not been honoured so far. He says he boycotted the talks and did not join them as the MD of the LWMC and the DCO Lahore had refused to talk to the workers directly.
Waseem Ajmal Chaudhry, MD LWMC, rubbishes the rumour about the company being privatised. He speaks of efforts to end the discretionary control of the daroghas over the attendance registers of the workers.
The digital attendance sheets, Chaudhry says, will be linked to salary registers so that the salaries are calculated automatically.
According to him, the new system will help them do justice to genuine workers who have to take the load of ghost workers. Their supervisors would ask them to clean the area at any cost.
Replying to a question about the possibility of workers coming to work only for attendance at 6am and 2pm slots and going missing in between, Waseem Ajmal Chaudhry says, "These are input-based systems. Besides, output-based methods are also in place to confirm a worker’s presence at work."
For example, if the workers in a union council are supposed to collect 500kgs of solid waste in a shift and they cannot, the company will put that particular union council under observation. Besides, the manual system of monitoring the workers is also in order and can be used to confirm the presence of workers in a union council. The pressure from other workers will also be on those who try to hoodwink the system.
The LWMC also plans to give the general public access to the video wall managed by the company so that the people can also track sanitary workers in a given area.
Regardless of the complexities and the adaptation issues involved, one finds the system of android-based attendance to be quite useful. The system, if it works properly, should also be replicated in other government departments, especially the revenue departments as well as the police where it is next to impossible for the general public to track down the concerned officials.