Lahore: The 65,000-strong staff of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) is set to slash almost half of its employees as etisalat finalises the Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS), commonly known as the Golden Handshake Scheme.
The Dubai company holds a 26 per cent stake in PTCL.
According to well placed sources in the Lahore office of PTCL, the VSS, targeting 30,000 employees and costing the government billions of rupees, would be launched after the mid-January meeting of its board of directors.
The sources said the VSS will be open to all lower cadres and the general managers or chief engineers will have the final word on the applications of officers and other senior staff. PTCL employs 5,000 professionals at the officer level.
"Except for a few outstanding procedural issues, the scheme has been fin-alised ahead of the board of directors' approval which is only a formality in the case of PTCL," said a top official in the company requesting anonymity.
Contrary to the original privatisation mechanism, the government, in a revised privatisation deal with etisalat in March, agreed to pay half the cost of the golden handshakes offered to surplus employees who had been promised lucrative packages after prolonged protests.
The sources said each PTCL employee opting for the Voluntary Separation Scheme would cost the government millions while half the amount is paid by the new management instead of the whole.
Resource strain
The government is liable to bear a total liability of the VSS worth Rs15 billion, say the sources who have access to the closely guarded PTCL privatisation documents. The PTCL plans of launching VSS would strain the government resources as the etisalat management believes the company is overstaffed and inefficient.
In October 2006, an indirect re-trenching was witnessed in the PTCL when the company did not extend the contract of its subsidiary, Telecom Foundation (TF), which resultantly laid off over 1,900 daily wages' employees working on the project. The Telecom Foundation employees, who lost their jobs due to non-renewal of the contract included mostly skilled workers such as fibre optic technicians, splicers, jointer and line technicians besides some unskilled labourers.
