PSM sale slammed

The Anti-Privatisation Alliance (APA), a broad-based coalition of progressive political workers, trade unionists, intellectuals and activists has strongly condemned the sale of Pakistan Steel Mills, terming it yet another concession of the government to the whims of international capital.
Aasim Sajjad of Peoples Rights Movement, Azad Qadri of PTCL and Azam Janjua of SMP have demanded an immediate inquiry into the decision to sell the PSM for a price that they have termed a farce.
They said the actual physical infrastructure of PSM had been valued at only $111 million, which was a disservice to PSM workers and the Pakistani people at large.
The APA leaders said privatisation policy had been showed to be contradictory even by government economists, because its very premises were flawed.
On the one hand it is claimed that state-owned enterprises are inefficient, however the fact of the matter is that public utilities such as Wapda, PTCL and PSM have actually subsidised the private sector by providing inputs such as electricity and steel at below market rates for decades.
In any case, public sector utilities are not necessarily designed to generate profit in any case, given that their primary concern is to meet the needs of the average consumer.
The APA leaders said in the same way that resistance to neo-liberalism was building around the world, a similar process would inevitably take root in Pakistan. They said that the first wave of this resistance was seen in the PTCL strike last June.
And although the government co-opted a certain section of the union leadership and thereby undermined the strike, the PTCL workforce has been politicised and will surely resist further moves to take away its hard-fought benefits.
In much the same way, even though the workers of PSM could not prevent privatisation from taking place, they too are likely to resist if and when they are subjected to the inevitable fallouts of privatisation.
The APA leaders said that the government should not expect that the working class would passively stand by and let neo-liberal policies ravage them entirely. Eventually, a movement would take shape and it would hold the government and all supporters of privatisation policies responsible for rapidly deteriorating social and economic conditions.