KESC sackings

KESC sackings

KARACHI: This is with reference to your news item of January 20 entitled “Belt-tightening: KESC sacks 4,000 staffers”. I’m afraid the power utility itself is responsible for its predicament. There were a number of things it could have tried. It could have offered a thousand workers initially to resign with a golden handshake of Rs 400,000 each. Then a few weeks later, it could have retrenched another thousand, offering a higher amount. Again, this could have been repeated a couple of months later. This could have, perhaps, prevented the massive protests that followed its decision to sack en masse thousands of workers.

Shakir Lakhani
Published in The Express Tribune, January 26th, 2011.