Whither Workers' Rights?
The
government needs to take the concerns of workers seriously lest they become
violent
By Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Last week, power-loom factory owners in
This is not the first or the last time that such an
incident has taken place in the second biggest industrial city in
The factory owner who ordered the firing upon the
workers in this latest incident is an MPA affiliated with the Pakistan Muslim
League-Quaid (PML-Q). This is not to say that a
factory owner associated with any other mainstream party is necessarily more
committed to protecting workers' basic freedoms. However, it does suggest just
how anti-worker the recently deposed PML-Q regime was.
Given the backdrop of an extremely anti-worker
government over the last many years, it is very significant that workers were
able to mobilise effectively to protest the shooting,
and then compel the authorities to at least make rhetorical commitments to
improving pay and working conditions. Of course, government functionaries have
made various promises in times gone by and will likely do so again in the future;
but as workers' capacity to organise themselves
improves, it will become increasingly difficult for the government to renege on
promises as has been the case far too often in the past.
While it is ultimately workers' organisation
that will determine if and to what extent things improve,
the overall state of affairs is not set to get any better in any meaningful way
in the short- or even medium-term. In the first instance, there is a massive
surplus pool of labour available to work that makes
it difficult for workers to drive a hard bargain. Many in the ranks of the
unemployed are often willing to work for even less than the going rate. Of
course, laying off workers who have learnt on the job is not a costless
exercise for owners, but ultimately the latter prefer subservience to a
relatively skilled yet agitated workforce.
The related point has to do with the political will
of the current government. Factory owners can get away with shooting, firing
and maiming workers in large part because the state is quite willing to
tolerate such actions. Indeed, the PML-Q regime bent over backwards for both
local and foreign capital under the pretext that investment and industrial
activity has to increase dramatically for
The recent announcement that workers will be
allowed to purchase 10 percent of shares in state enterprises sold to the
private sector is a case of the government engaging in populist rhetoric. In
short, the political leadership knows that privatisation
is extremely unpopular, but remains committed to the policy in line with the
demands of its financiers in
24 percent of PTCL's
shares were sold in June 2005 to Arab company Etisalat,
but more crucially the government relinquished complete control over
management. This gave Etisalat full power to make
decisions about PTCL's future direction. Hardly two
years later, more than 30,000 regular employees were let go and more than 8,000
contract workers are currently on the chopping block. The fact that the
government retains 76 percent of the shares has no bearing on management
affairs. Thus, even if workers were to acquire 10 percent shares in privatised state enterprises, they would not be given
management control, and hence would remain as vulnerable to the whims of
anti-worker managers as the power-loom workers of
Then workers are also subject to the ruthlessness
of the global production chain in which capital is allowed to be as mobile as
it needs to be to expand itself. In other words, the putrid working conditions
of third world labour in industries such as textiles
can be explained in large part by the fact that international capital comes and
goes as it pleases. It is a well-known fact that the t-shirts that are produced
in Pakistan are also produced in dozens of other third world countries, which
means that the big brand name producers of the world simply jump ship and
'outsource' to a new location if and when they feel it is more profitable to do
so. Given the huge pool of surplus labour, this is a
major structural constraint to improved working conditions.
Finally, there is the impact that Chinese industry
is having on economies around the world. In short, the Chinese industry
operates at a scale that just about everyone else can only dream about and it specialises in many low-cost consumer industries that are
the major source of export earning for third world economies such as Pakistan.
So, for example, Pakistani textiles have been subject to much more ruthless
competition from Chinese textiles than anyone else over the last many decades.
And things are set to get even more cutthroat.
All told, power-loom workers of
Courtesy: The News