Union is strength

May 1, 2008, an ideal opportunity to revisit the labour laws in Pakistan that blatantly court the employers at the cost of putting workers into misery

By Babar Mirza

In his speech to the National Assembly on obtaining vote of confidence last month, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani announced that trade unions would be restored and the Industrial Relations Ordinance (IRO) 2002 would be abolished. On the face of it, it sounds like good news: trade unions protect labourers' rights so they should be allowed to function, and IRO 2002 must be some inherently unjust law enacted by Musharraf that should be discarded in toto.

No doubt, the prime minister knew how it would sound. In the presence of such pressing matters as the restoration of judges, war on terror and energy crisis, an announcement concerning perennial labour issues just needed to sound good to evade public scrutiny.

Hardly has anyone pointed out the fact that, unlike student unions, trade unions were not banned during the previous government. Also, a law regulating industrial disputes between employers and workers -- a crucial determinant of the orientation of a government's economic policies -- cannot simply be abolished without having formulated an alternative legislation (in its election manifesto, the PPP had in fact promised to 'review' the IRO 2002). However, the prime minister didn't even suggest anything in this regard. The lack of legal and political insight manifest in the announcement is quite similar to that was exposed in the announcement to abolish the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR). The point being that you may want the laws in question to be one way or another, but it would be chaos if you try to get rid of them entirely.

Having a law in a particular way implies following the social consensus on a particular question or favouring one social force over another when there are conflicting interests involved. The IRO 2002 falls in the latter category: it determines power distribution and rules of the game between employers and workers, and any change in this law would translate into increasing the relative power of one party over the other.

Currently, as has also been the case historically, labour laws in Pakistan blatantly court the employers at the cost of putting workers into misery. The first step in this relationship is to exclude as many workers from legal protection as possible with such handy excuses as national security. Thus, the right to unionise -- almost a sine qua non for other labour rights -- is extended only to industrial workers, orphaning a long list of occupations and institutions: agricultural workers, teachers, charity/non-profit workers, export processing zone workers, workers employed at managerial and supervisory posts, and numerous institutions that have even a quixotic connection with security or state.

The second step is to brainstorm about all the procedural requirements which would be so time-consuming and pointless that trade unions could seldom satisfy them. The pre-requisites to announcing a strike are so numerous, protracted and strict that one is deluded into hopelessly imagining a gauntlet upon the Great Wall. Unions of bank employees cannot use bank premises or any other facility for union activities. Time periods for notice, negotiations, conciliation and arbitration seem to attempt at diluting the workers' resolve to go to strike. Even if the resolve endures, the government's power to ban any strike lasting more than 15 days on grounds of 'hardship to community' comes as a lethal axe to the workers' struggle.

The laws facilitating these two steps include the Industrial Relations Ordinance 2002, the Essential Services Act 1952 and the Banking Companies Ordinance 1962. And here we are only talking about laws directly related to unions, which is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to prominent lawyer Faisal H. Naqvi, Pakistan has a body of 160 laws, regulations and rules concerning labour, though most of them are ignored in practice. However, laws relating to the employment contract, wages, working conditions, rest time, maternity benefits, child labour and bonded labour are crucial to gauge the wretched state of labour rights in Pakistan.

The third step involves enforcement. Government officials, police and employers all work together to ensure that the meagre legal rights available to workers on paper are not accessible to them in reality. Ayub and Zia couldn't care less about workers and relied exclusively on the third step to secure themselves and those who were secured through them. Contrary to popular perception, and quite ironically, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto also used the strength of the state to crush the strength of the street in early 1970s. The Labour Policy of 1972 is a record of Z. A. Bhutto's aversion to labour activism. Benazir Bhutto's first term in office lifted the Zia era ban on trade unions, but in her second term, she hardly did anything worth mentioning for workers. Nawaz Sharif also couldn't develop a reputation for adopting pro-labour policies during his two terms (because, for example, he didn't allow trade unions in his own factories).

At present, though both PPP and PML-N have the heavy mandate and pressure of the people to at least make some promises to the workers, they still might succumb to a massive global (read US) pressure to introduce liberal market mechanisms, just like they did in the 1990s by accepting economic reforms suggested by IMF and the World Bank. Much would depend however on the workers themselves. If they consistently put sufficient pressure on the government, they can get their rights restored as well as duly enforced.

Unfortunately, not much exists at present in the name of 'the labour movement'. Due to legal and political constraints and divisions among workers, the percentage of unionized workers is no more than three percent of the national labour force (that is, less than 1.5 millions workers out of total of 51 million). Unlike 1968-69, when students and workers together toppled a military dictatorship, participation of workers in the political events of last year was marked by its absence.

However, the workers can get a good deal if they exploit the political space available now to assert and obtain their rights. They must also realise that no one, not even the present popular government, would give them their universally recognised rights unless they make vigorous and united efforts in this regard. In this regard, the May 1 offers them an ideal opportunity to get together and organise themselves to struggle for their rights.