Muzaffarabad [PoJK], October 21 : The Ad-hoc Employees' Action Committee held a press conference, exposing the failure and incompetence of the PoJK government regarding decades-old demand for regularisation and job stability of contractual workers.
The representative of the Ad-hoc Employees' Action Committee, Salik Abbasi said that these contractual employees have been working in the region for a long time.
Abbasi said, "These ad-hoc, contractual employees have been working in the region for a long time. Their maximum count may be 5,000, or less if some of them would have been adjusted. This was the agreement which was achieved after a struggle of 17-19 days of protest by daughters and workers of the state. 13 days have passed; no development has taken place. The chairman of this ad hoc committee Colonel Wakar Noor has not even taken the initiative to look into the matter, no file has even been moved till now. Instead, they are issuing advertisements and irrelevant stuff."
The Ad-Hoc Employee further highlighted that they want everyone's service to be regularised.
He said," Someone here has 23 years' service, some have 16 years of service, someone has eight years, we want if even someone has even one day of service, they should be regularized too. Those who had gone through the process at that time and were close to them were regularized. They removed the legal hurdles and regularized them, and those who didn't have a guardian were left. Till now, they are at risk of being ad-hoc."
Recently, the demonstration against the administration has intensified with the frustrated employees sitting in protests and taking out rallies, expressing their distress on government negligence despite similar regularisation being happening in different parts of Pakistan.
The Ad-hoc employees in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir are seeking permanent status, protesting for their regularisation and job security. Their struggle for stability is nothing new, as these contractual workers have been protesting similarly for over the past two decades only to fall on deaf ears of local administrations.