Govt stand on Wage Board conflicting
KARACHI – APNS has strongly criticised the statement of the Federal Minister for Information Sheikh Rashid issued at the end of the inter-provincial information ministers’ meeting.
The body has also refuted a subsequent statement released by the spokesman of the Ministry of Information Monday in which he expressed ignorance of the fact that the Ministry had in any way agreed with the APNS stand which advocated drastic reversal of the decisions of the Wage Board.
The APNS statement reads as follows: “The spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Information is clearly telling lies in an attempt to cover up his ministry’s conflicting stand on the Wage Board issue. The fact of the matter is that both the ministries of Information and Labour represented by two Federal Secretaries and under the guidance of the Federal Labour Minister had agreed in two meetings with the office-bearers of APNS, that the Wage Board had become largely obsolete and needed to be dispensed with in its current form.
The decisions of two meetings held on August 21, 2001 and December 28 later that year, clearly contain the relevant clauses that establish the full agreement of the government measures that sought to radically alter the decisions and mechanism of all wage boards. This contained all the clauses of the six-point non-paper and the modifying four paragraph “sign posts” available as public documents since 2002 and included in the documents filed by the APNS attorney Hafiz Pirzada in the SC challenging the Wage Board. Our contention can thus be easily verified from the public record.
The real reason for the cover-up and the lies however, is that the original stand of the govt has changed. Due to the bitter opposition with which the APNS-CPNE confronted President Musharraf’s govt at the inception of the black Press laws, we have still not been forgiven. Newspapers and documentation in the ministries will clearly inform history and the conscious citizen as to who spoke up and who remained silent. Our legal and just battle to reverse all wage boards for non-journalists and curtail draconian govt interference in the workings of a free Press will continue in the courts and in ministry board rooms in Islamabad, whenever necessary.”
Source: The Nation
Date:5/26/2004
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