In recent years, the working class in Pakistan has faced the worst attacks in the country’s history. The capitalist ruling class and the military-civil state elite, under IMF directives, are transferring the entire burden of the economic crisis onto the working class. New policies amounting to economic slaughter of workers are being introduced on a daily basis. First, the pensions and leave encashment of ordinary government employees and workers in Punjab were plundered, and now the Sindh provincial government is doing the same. In Punjab, over 2,000 Basic Health Units and Regional Health Centres have been outsourced to private contractors, whilst more than 43,000 healthcare workers who had been working in these facilities for two decades have been dismissed. Now, in the next phase of health department privatisation, a schedule for outsourcing tehsil and district headquarters hospitals and teaching hospitals is being released. Similarly, the outsourcing of government schools in the province has also begun. Furthermore, under the guise of “rationalisation,” permanent teachers are being transferred to remote areas so that they become frustrated and resign of their own accord. Reports indicate that approximately 47,000 teachers have been deemed “surplus” by the provincial education department and plans have been made to dismiss them. Likewise, municipal waste management and sanitation departments have been completely outsourced, and the private companies that have obtained these contracts are severely exploiting daily-wage workers. It should be noted that all of this is happening in various stages in Sindh, KPK, and Balochistan as well.
Federal Departments Under Attack
Regarding federal departments, they too are facing relentless attacks of privatisation and downsizing. Recently, the Utility Stores Corporation has been shut down. Approximately 6,000 contract employees have been dismissed, whilst 5,000 permanent employees have been placed in a surplus pool where they will be so harassed that the vast majority will be forced to resign. After the “pruning” of PIA is complete, one unsuccessful bid for its privatisation has already been made and another is forthcoming. Similarly, from the privatisation of electricity distribution companies to the outsourcing of trains, railway stations, and airports, privatisation is being pushed under various names and labels. In public institutions and departments, whether federal or provincial, hardly any new recruitment is taking place and there is a severe shortage of working staff. But whatever little recruitment is happening is on daily-wage or ad-hoc basis, and these workers are completely deprived of all labour rights. Although labour laws were already practically non-existent in the country, the rulers are now making severely anti-worker amendments to even these paper-only laws through new legislation, beginning with the Punjab Labour Code 2024, and the remaining provinces will follow suit in the coming period.
Why Is the Workers’ Movement Struggling?
The biggest reason for all these relentless attacks is that the ruling class and state elite have fully gauged the weakness of the workers’ movement and are taking full advantage of it. On the other hand, the current military clique in power and its Form-47 government have been emboldened by their temporary victory in the internal power struggle of the ruling class, the simultaneous approval from both Chinese and American imperialism, and some superficial successes on the foreign and military fronts. But the question is: why is the workers’ movement in such a dire state, and why is it unable to resist all these attacks?
Here we will not discuss in detail the historical reasons for the weaknesses of the workers’ movement in Pakistan, which include the economism and trade union narrow-mindedness of Stalinist and Maoist parties and their ideological and political betrayals, the brutal repression of dictator Zia-ul-Haq’s eleven-year dark era, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent period of political decline and semi-reaction lasting more than one and a half decades, China’s return to capitalism, the successive betrayals of the People’s Party—the former tradition of workers in the country—and consequently its demise as a tradition. But what is important is that despite all inherited weaknesses, the workers’ movement, especially public sector workers, has fought countless magnificent and courageous battles from the 2008 economic crisis up to recent years, details of which we have described in other writings.
The Rise and Decline of APGEGA
The ultimate result of this upsurge in the workers’ movement was the formation in 2020 of a platform called APGEGA (All Pakistan Government Employees Grand Alliance), comprising many organisations, associations, and unions of ordinary government employees and public institution workers at federal and provincial levels. Through struggle on this platform, employees and workers have won several important demands including pay increases and the regularisation of contract employees in several departments. However, if we look at the past two to three years, we find that not only has APGEGA faced successive failures in achieving its demands, but other movements that arose inspired by APGEGA have also faced failure. These include the magnificent anti-privatisation struggle of teachers and Lady Health Workers in Punjab in October 2023, the struggle for federal-pattern pay increases after the recent budget in KPK, Punjab, and Sindh, and the Grand Health Alliance Punjab’s anti-privatisation struggle.
The failure and retreat of these battles has undoubtedly temporarily demoralised workers and employees whilst emboldening the rulers, who will express this in further anti-worker actions in the coming days. Therefore, correctly diagnosing the reasons for these retreats and formulating the necessary measures and proposals to solve the problem is an important duty of activists, and this is the subject of discussion in this article.
The Workers’ Movement and Class-Conscious Politics
If we look at the workers’ movement over roughly the past two decades in general and the last few years in particular, we see many weaknesses and problems. The first problem is that more than 90% of Pakistan’s working class, especially private sector workers, are not organised in trade unions at all. In fact, in the private sector, two to three generations of workers have passed who know nothing about trade unions and workers’ struggle. Except for Faisalabad’s power loom workers and a few other examples, almost all struggle over the past two decades has been based on public sector workers. There are many objective reasons for this, including severe pressure from industrial crisis and unemployment, but our purpose here is not to lament objective difficulties but to address the internal and subjective weaknesses of the workers’ movement.
Similarly, if we talk about the public sector, where countless battles have been fought during this entire period, we see a severe lack of workers’ unity. There is a long list of federal public institutions including WAPDA, Railways, PTCL, PIA, and Steel Mills that have been under continuous attack from privatisation and other anti-worker measures for the past two decades. But their trade unions and workers’ associations have fought their separate battles against all these problems, yet despite having similar issues, they have been unable to establish a united front and fight a joint battle. Take the recent example of Punjab province, where both the health and education departments are simultaneously under attack from privatisation, but the unions and associations of both have failed to run a joint anti-privatisation movement. Even within a single public institution or government department, there are separate organisations of workers and employees according to skill and scale who seem unable to come onto the same page.
The Need to Broaden Demands
Furthermore, if we look at the demands of workers’ struggles over the past three decades, we see a continuous journey in circles. All the severity of economic attacks, the deprivation of political and democratic rights, the deepening general political, economic, social, and state crisis of the country, the popular movements for national and democratic rights in various parts of the country, the global economic crisis of capitalism, and severe upheaval in international relations—all these factors together have not been able to bring trade unions and workers’ associations out of their specific trade union narrow-mindedness. For a long period, their demands have been limited to extremely immediate penny-ante demands or extremely defensive slogans (such as opposing privatisation).
All these immediate demands are absolutely correct in their place and we fully support them, but if the workers’ movement is to take a new upsurge and gain the support of broader sections of the public, it must go beyond these to present transitional anti-capitalist radical economic demands, political and national democratic rights-based demands, and ultimately demands and programmes based on the working class’s right to ownership and right to governance. It is the result of being limited to penny-ante immediate demands for so long that the workers’ movement is cut off from broader sections of society and the public, and instead of appearing as a force on the country’s political and social horizon, it feels suspended in a vacuum.
It is this trade union narrow-mindedness of the workers’ movement that prevented it from successfully gaining public support even in the struggle against such extremely anti-people policies as health and education privatisation. In fact, its leadership made no particular effort to do so because, due to their specific narrow-mindedness, they have no idea of the importance of broader public support for the success of struggle. Similarly, no major union, association, platform, or alliance of the workers’ movement has rarely ever expressed solidarity with the movements for national and democratic rights in various parts of the country, the struggles of farmers, or the struggles for women’s or minorities’ rights, and practical action in this regard has perhaps never been taken.
The Root Problem: Disconnect from Socialist Principles
But if we go to the root of all the weaknesses of the workers’ movement described above, the essence of the whole problem is that over the past three to four decades, the workers’ movement has become completely disconnected from its foundational principles of socialism. Although the situation was not satisfactory in ideological terms even before this, due to the existence of the Soviet Union and the influence of the Stalinist and Maoist left on the workers’ movement, socialist ideas, even in a distorted form, continued to reach the workers’ movement to some extent. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s return to capitalism, and the disintegration of the Stalinist and Maoist left have left the workers’ movement completely at the mercy of capitalist ideology, and the result of this is appearing in the form of all these weaknesses of the movement.
It should be clear that theory and practice have an extremely deep dialectical relationship with each other, and one cannot be complete without the other. So practical struggle has taken place over the past two decades—especially public sector workers have fought magnificent battles and made sacrifices for their rights—but ideologically the workers’ movement has not been able to reconnect with its foundations. This is today the most fundamental weakness of the workers’ movement in Pakistan, which urgently needs to be addressed. Furthermore, today in the era of severe global organic crisis of the capitalist system, the question of ideology cannot be postponed until tomorrow. It needs immediate attention because in today’s crisis situation, without foundational socialist principles, organising a nationwide workers’ movement and challenging the capitalist system and state is a distant matter—even a workers’ union or federation cannot be run healthily for long, nor can any significant success be achieved in the struggle for immediate demands.
The Continuous Betrayals of Trade Union Leaderships
If we survey all the struggle from the anti-privatisation movement of PTCL in 2005 to the anti-privatisation movement of Punjab government school teachers and Lady Health Workers in October 2023, it becomes clear that the biggest immediate reason for whatever failures the workers’ movement has faced is the open betrayals of trade union and association leaderships. In reality, these compromising and treacherous union leaderships are the biggest agents and brokers of the capitalist class, rulers, and state within the workers’ movement. Their primary objective is that workers should not struggle at all and should silently keep taking beatings. For this purpose, they use every tactic including spreading demoralisation in the workers’ movement, frightening workers with the power of employers and the state, stalling, and cajoling them.
But if workers, despite all their obstacles, come down to fight and these leaderships are reluctantly forced to “lead” the movement to maintain their leadership, from the very beginning their full effort is to make some sugar-coated compromise with employers, administration, or government as soon as possible and shut down the movement whilst throwing dust in the workers’ eyes. Similarly, these so-called workers’ leaders are experts at spinning the movement in circles to tire it out and keep it within specific limits so that workers themselves retreat in frustration and compromise becomes easier for the leadership.
For example, in the past few years, the APGEGA leadership had several opportunities to go beyond protest sit-ins and call a nationwide general strike, but they did not do so out of fear of the movement going “out of control.” Similarly, it has been repeatedly observed that these so-called leaders have betrayed movements at their peak in “negotiations” held behind closed doors with extremely anti-worker rulers, and afterwards, to wipe the shame from their faces, they have raised a hue and cry of “we were deceived!!” as if they were innocent babes and had no idea of the ruling class’s hostility to workers.
Leadership as an Obstacle to Progress
Furthermore, where we have previously discussed the workers’ movement becoming disconnected from its foundational principles and the resulting damage, it is also extremely important to clarify that the biggest enemies of socialist ideas in the workers’ movement are these very treacherous and compromising leaderships. They enthusiastically promote every kind of reactionary ideology and elements in the movement, including religious organisations, capitalist political parties, and NGOs, but they try to obstruct the path of socialist ideas and socialists in every way. These efforts are sometimes made with the pretence of being “non-political” whilst taking recourse to trade union narrow-mindedness, and sometimes through open reactionary allegations and attacks.
The most opposition and resistance to raising the demands, programme, and methods of struggle of the workers’ movement to a higher level also comes from these very union leaderships. Similarly, whether it is the matter of gaining public support by connecting their demands with broader public interest or expressing solidarity with the movements fighting for national, democratic, and other rights in the country, everywhere these same union leaderships obstruct progress, sometimes taking recourse to economistic trade union narrow-mindedness and sometimes playing on the backward prejudices of the more backward sections of the working class. These leaderships are also at the forefront of stoking prejudices of scale, skill, and category, and keeping workers of different public institutions and private industries separated from each other. Nor have these leaderships ever played any role in helping organise unorganised workers despite having leadership of big unions and associations.
The Need for Democratic Elections in Unions
Furthermore, interestingly, the vast majority of these treacherous union leaders have been imposed on workers for a long period without any election and are playing with them. Here a question is often asked: despite the open betrayals of these unelected leaderships, why are workers still tolerating them? The answer is that workers, learning from their bitter experiences, have become fully aware of their real character and deeply hate them. But it was precisely as a result of the historical weaknesses of the workers’ movement mentioned earlier and consequent disconnection from its foundational socialist principles that these treacherous leaderships got the opportunity to impose themselves on the movement, and for a long period, due to there being no alternative, workers have had to tolerate them unwillingly.
But now workers’ patience has run out and they are eager to throw these traitors out of the workers’ movement. In this regard, we believe that transparent internal elections should be held immediately in all trade unions, workers’ associations, and other workers’ platforms throughout Pakistan so that a new, honest, and fighting workers’ leadership can emerge that is fully accountable to ordinary workers. But it should also be kept in mind that these treacherous leaderships will never easily let their “leadership” slip from their hands and will make every effort to remain in unelected positions. But if the workers’ movement is to advance, it will inevitably have to rid itself of these traitors, and for this, the working class will have to fight an internal battle to ensure transparent elections in their platforms.
The Role of Organised Workers and Activists
Taking socialist ideas to the working class and providing them every possible help in getting organised is one of the primary duties of socialist activists. But this is by no means an easy task. On one hand, it requires extremely courageous and patient sustained struggle, whilst on the other, maintaining a sense of balance and avoiding both opportunism and ultra-leftism is also essential.
For this purpose, socialist activists need to intervene vigorously in the workers’ movement with their clear identity and programme. At the same time, immediately organising the most fighting sections of ordinary workers and employees in every factory, industrial area, public institution, and government department within their reach into study circles and introducing them to socialist ideas has now become an urgent demand of the time. These same study circles, as they transform into fighting cells, will on one hand tremendously strengthen the workers’ movement and provide it with a new fighting leadership, whilst on the other, they will provide socialist activists with that foundation in the workers’ movement on the strength of which they can fulfil their historic duty in future movements for fundamental change. Through a socialist transformation, ending the capitalist system and state, they will ensure the ultimate liberation of the working class.
