Perilous state of the working class

International Labour Day or May Day is celebrated worldwide on May 1 every year in commemoration of the struggle of the Chicago workers for rights and the death of many of them at the hands of the police in 1886.

The Second International decided to proclaim May 1 as International Labour Day in 1889 in a gesture of respect towards the Chicago martyrs of the working class. On the day, rallies are taken out, public meetings held, and the state of workers and their struggles for rights enunciated.

In Pakistan too, this annual ritual is on display. However, welcome as the signs of some life in the trade unions and workers’ organisations is, it must honestly be admitted that the working class movement today is a pale shadow of its once mighty, and dreaded by the capitalists, strength.

The embrace of a neoliberal free market economy and privatisation of the commanding heights of the economy post-Bhutto has led to many of the industrial enterprises privatised being converted after selling off the plant and machinery into real estate (Ittefaq Foundry is a notable exception).

The remaining state-owned enterprises, after years of efforts for privatisation failed because these are inherently heavy industry, long gestation, relatively low return businesses, lie shut, with a heavy non-productive drain on national resources. Wholesale privatisation since the late 1970s failed to revive the moribund private industrial sector despite incentives.

Pakistan therefore remains stuck with whatever survives of the industrialisation of the economy since independence, essentially answering to the description of an economy mired in deindustrialisation over the last almost half a century.

The turn towards a neoliberal free market economy also brought in its train a free hand to employers to take down the once mighty trade unions. This was achieved through banning militant unions, creating pocket unions, outsourcing labour to contractors who refused to recognise labour rights and kept ‘their’ contracted workers on a tight (and sometimes violent) leash, and in recent years, a return to the early years of capitalism’s emergence in the world when home based workers were a norm. The result is that the trade unions, insofar as they still exist and function, are unable to effectively struggle for workers’ rights.

Meanwhile, despite the constant lip service to a minimum wage, workers suffer from low wages, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and inadequate access to healthcare and social protection. In the formal sector, hardly 2-3 percent of workers are unionised today. Things in the informal sector are even worse, with little or no whiff of unionisation to enable them to take a stand on decent wages and work conditions.

Pakistan is a champion amongst the countries of the world in having legislation about everything under the sun on its books, without any signs that all these laws, including labour laws, are practiced in anything but the breach. Unemployment, crippling inflation and virtual voicelessness has produced human misery on an unprecedented scale.

Child and bonded labour, exploitative practices (often implemented through violence by employers and their hired goons) and the unrelenting pressure of long working hours to meet the minimum requirements of life for workers and their families reflect the desperate conditions that of late have produced a growing trend of suicides due to miserable poverty.

If the urban working class is in dire straits, the fate of the agricultural work force is no better. Land reforms having been reversed have dropped off our national radar despite the history of capitalist development and examples from the early industrialising countries of the west showing the need for such reforms to feed and fuel the industrialisation process. Instead, we are witness to agricultural land being swallowed up by high-income housing societies. The downturn in the economy has devastated further the lives of industrial workers and the peasantry.

Unfortunately, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) relies on government statistics (patently false) to paint a glowing picture of labour rights and adherence to the ILO’s conventions and regulations that Pakistan has signed but, like all our laws, practices more in the breach. According to the ILO (relying on government data), Pakistan’s workforce consists of 61 million souls.

It is the 9th largest workforce in the world. The ILO claims a 94.1 percent employment rate, 73 percent of this being located in the informal sector. A further breakdown reveals that agriculture employs 43.5 percent, services 34 percent and industry 22.5 percent.

However sceptical one may be of these official figures, they do indicate the rising trend of young people (including young women) seeking better pastures by moving from the rural areas to the cities for education, employment, and a better life.

Pakistan’s position as the fastest urbanising country in South Asia is another indicator of this trend. Logically, the peasantry left behind must consist of an ageing populace. It would be an interesting economic and sociological study to examine the effects on agriculture of this rapidly changing rural demography.

Critics from within the labour movement argue the current trade union movement leadership too is ageing, trapped in the past with little clue about the digitalised new world and its challenges and opportunities. As a background to this state of affairs, we could argue that it is the collapse of the Pakistani Left in the early 1980s that has deprived the working class movement of its intellectual and theoretical guide to conducting day-to-day economic struggles while seeking ways tolink these struggles with the aspiration for revolutionary change of the existing capitalist-feudal elite-dominated system in favour of a just, equitable, fair order dedicated to the people, not vested interests.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023