Hundreds of thousands of workers in Pakistan have been engaging in mass strikes and protests, taking to the streets, shutting down factories and offices, blocking roads and burning vehicles. Their anger is directed against a government riddled with corruption and against Pakistan’s ruling class, who, like capitalists worldwide, are trying to make the working class pay the price of its economic crisis, slashing wages, laying off workers and attacking living standards. The working class is fighting back, undeterred by the brutal retaliation of the police, arrests and even killing of leaders:
• Earlier this month, over 100,000 textile workers in Faisalabad, Pakistan’s third-largest city, shut down 20,000 power looms and took over the city. Men, women and youths armed with stones fought police equipped with rifles and guns; these workers comprise 38% of the country’s industrial workers and produce half its exports.
• Ten thousand workers at the Karachi Electric Supply Co. occupied its headquarters a few weeks ago, forcing the bosses to reinstate 4,500 fired workers.
• Striking Pakistan International Airlines workers brought air traffic to a standstill, sitting in at airports in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar, disabling ground service vehicles, blocking flights and stopping passengers from checking in. They were protesting layoffs and proposed selloffs of routes to Turkish Airlines.
• Railway workers organized a demonstration in Lahore against the proposed downsizing of 20,000 jobs, defying thugs employed by Pakistan’s governing People’s Party to intimidate them.
• Public sector workers in the Post Office, the Telecommunications Company, the Water and Power Development Authority, steel mills and the Federal Revenue Office are fighting privatization and firings.
• Ship breakers in Baluchistan and young hospital doctors from Baluchistan to Punjab are mobilizing for better pay and conditions.
Following the Lead of 50,000 Militant Textile Workers
These struggles follow the actions of 50,000 textile power loom operators who struck in 2008, shutting down factories for four days. Four leaders were arrested, framed under anti-terrorist laws and jailed. The judiciary, serving the rulers’ dictates, declares workers’ strikes illegal, rejects bail for arrested workers and ignores violations of labor laws, while failing to enforce minimum-wage laws and legal remedies for those losing jobs.
The workers — many who make $61 a month (less than the minimum wage) — have no pension rights, work in inhuman conditions and suffer grinding poverty. Thousands of other workers who marched in solidarity with them were fired on, with nine injured seriously. However, the strength of the protest forced the owners — among the richest people in Pakistan — to agree to the strikers’ demand to be paid previously negotiated wage increases.
This year Pakistan’s growth rate is only 2%, with an enormous trade deficit and a growing budget debt. Following International Monetary Fund dictates, the government has cut all subsidies, increased prices of food, (up 200% to 300% in the last two years), electricity, gas and most household items. In 2010 inflation rose higher than any year in Pakistan’s history, affecting all working-class families and pushing the lowest-paid into intolerable living conditions.
Struggle Between Classes Heating Up
Class lines are sharply drawn in Pakistan. Since factories, businesses and land are often owned by politicians and army officials (who also run public utilities for their own profit), the confrontation between workers and bosses pits the working class directly against the full power of the state. But as workers’ resistance increases, divisions are deepening in the ruling class.
The main opposition party (whose leaders are also big landowners and factory bosses) is maneuvering to lead the mass dissatisfaction by distancing itself from the despised Pakistan People’s Party-led coalition government of President Asif Ali Zardari and the military. This struggle for power is behind the recent political and ethnic violence in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, main seaport and financial center; 300 people were killed in July alone, in riots instigated by armed thugs hired by the warring political parties to spread hatred and fear.
Clearly, workers and peasants are not fooled by either party. Victories like that of the 10,000 Karachi Electric Supply Company workers has strengthened the working class and emboldened more workers to take militant actions.
Reforms Won’t Cut It; Workers Need Communism to Destroy Racist Super-Exploitation
But workers need to look beyond reforms. Hard-won gains are easily reversed when bosses control the means of production and the state apparatus. Already Pakistani textile bosses are planning to move their factories to Bangladesh where workers — despite militant actions last year that doubled the minimum wage — are still paid half the wage of Pakistani workers. Lower labor costs mean lucrative contracts with international giants like JC Penney, Wal-Mart, H&M, Kohl’s, Marks & Spencer and Carrefour, which already manufacture in Bangladesh.
These outfits employ blatant racism in exploiting these non-white South Asian workers, much as they do in the U.S., Britain, France and Germany. There they make super-profits off the backs of black, Latino and immigrant workers, based on lower wages, worse medical care, mass imprisonment and deportation threats. Meanwhile, Obama serves his U.S. bosses, bombing Pakistan and killing hundreds of civilians while sending billions of workers’ tax dollars to arm the Pakistani military that enforces the poverty of workers there.
Workers need to unite internationally, across all borders, to support these embattled workers in Pakistan and expose the multi-national exploiters from the imperialist countries. Building PLP in Pakistan to destroy the capitalist profit system and erecting a worker-run communist society, and to eliminate bosses and profits along with the racism and wars they create, is the revolutionary road to follow.