Pakistan: Enraged Workers Strike, Burn Government Buildings

PAKISTAN, June 28 — Prolonged daily power outages in almost every big city and small town have provoked widespread violent protests and strikes by angry workers. They have set fire to government-owned buildings, property, vehicles and offices belonging to the Water and Power Development Authority.

Almost every day the protestors are besieging grid stations, blocking trains, closing roads, pelting the police with stones and fearlessly facing attacks from cops wielding batons and hurling tear gas. They have destroyed traffic signals and attacked shops which do not close down. 

When angry workers burned a few homes of ministers and ruling-class-elected representatives, the latter’s personal guards and police shot four demonstrators to death and injured dozens of others. 

Workers staged a sit-down outside the Guddu Thermal Power House in Sindh province, chanting against the bosses for their negligence, lousy working conditions, lack of necessary tools and corruption, all of which caused the death of a co-worker. The security commander — a politically influential person affiliated with the ruling party — demanded the workers end their protest and chanting. After trading hot words with the workers, he left for his office. Later, his brother, accompanied by some gunmen, arrived and killed five workers on the spot, severely injuring 14 others.

Responding to this brutal act, workers shut down the plant and organized a huge march, demanding the arrest of all the culprits, including the security commander and the managing director of the power house. Workers are fuming and are organizing a city-wide strike in Guddu and its surroundings.

The energy crisis, caused by the bosses’ corruption, incompetence and lack of planning, is forcing layoffs, as well as riding roughshod over workers’ daily lives. Workers are angry over the poverty, unemployment, exploitation and oppression. Recognizing their enemies, they believe these bosses are responsible for all their miseries; and want to get rid of the bosses. But they do not yet have the leadership which can organize their anger and militancy towards an international communist revolution.

Comrades and friends of PLP are trying to expose the bosses and explaining that voting for one bosses’ party or another won’t change their lives but will continue their misery. 

At the Guddu Power House demonstration, our comrade and some friends delivered revolutionary speeches and asked the workers to organize against the viciousness of the capitalist system and the brutal bosses, and for a communist revolution. They condemned the puppet union leadership, explaining that PLP is the true party of the working class, fighting for a society run by our class, for a world without exploitation, poverty, inequality, injustice and torture — a communist world!