ISLAMABAD, Jan 2: The Anti-Privatisation Alliance in its roundtable conference held here on Sunday vowed to resist privatisation of state enterprises and urged the need to formulate an alternative economic policy paradigm.

The conference was organised by the alliance at the National Press Club and was attended by leaders of trade unions, political workers, teachers, students and people from the civil society.

The conference threatened to give a general strike call in coming months if the government continued to toe the line of the international financial institutions and carried on with further privatisation.

Aasim Sajjad of Workers Party Pakistan (WPP) said the successive governments had been following the atrocious policies for the last two decades at the behest of the international donors and had succeeded in pushing the country's working people into a state of economic and social misery.

He said around the world experts had asserted that the state should withdraw from the economic sphere and leave allocation of resources to the market. However, he said, this policy ignored the fact that private sector did not cater for the working class and it had increased unemployment and worsened the people's ability with regard to access to basic amenities such as health and education.

Khawaja Sarmad of Awami Jamhoori Forum said more than 160 public enterprises had been privatised and majority of them had subsequently been shut down or were being operated even more inefficiently than earlier. He talked at length about the debacle of PTCL's privatisation and said 40,000 workers of the enterprise had been removed from their jobs.

Nisar Shah of the Labour Party Pakistan spoke extensively on the upcoming privatisations of Pakistan Post and Iesco and also warned that OGDCL was once again on the privatisation list as a bid was made to privatise it in late 2008.

Rana Hassan, Malik Maqbool, Azad Qadri of PTCL workers Union, Aqleem Khan of OGDCL, Malik Fateh of Wapda, Moazzam Khan of Pakistan Post, Zahoor Awan of Pakistan Workers Federation, Nazir Javed of PWD, Raja Altaf of Railways Workers Union, Dr Saghir Alam of Punjab Teachers Union and Alia Amirali of Workers Party Pakistan (WPP) spoke on the occasion.