Union Strike

Something out of the ordinary has happened over the past 3 weeks. The PTCL workers Union has pulled off a successful strike and has managed to get the privatization of the company postponed indefinitely. It is by no means a minute task and is a monumental accomplishment as far as rights based movements are concerned in Pakistan. The spirit of this resistance however has not yet donned the cloak of a resistance movement per se and if it is to sustain itself over a period of time, it must do exactly that.

On Saturday I got out of bed and walked to the front door to get the papers and the news about the strike was on the cover page. I have not smiled the paper like this in years. ‘Finally’, I thought to myself. Finally someone in this country has stood up in the face of oppression and waged a struggle for their rights and forced the oppressor to back down. Finally someone in this country has stood up for an ideal they believe in, and in an unflinching manner, faced the music till the end. And in this case it ended with a euphoric march outside PTCL headquarters in Islamabad and in garlands of flowers for the Union negotiators.

The Union leaders must be lauded for adopting non-violence and not compromising on their ideals. Some may say that compromise is the synergetic way to go, but the struggle would have gone home if ideals were compromised on.

The battle has surely been won but the war is still on. PTCL privatization was something, which the State has been banking on for years and in my opinion a significant reason for the Union’s success was that they took the State by surprise. No one anticipated that the workers could launch such a spirited offensive. A workers union activity on this scale has not been witnessed in decades. Now comes the real test.

Harassment by the intelligence agencies and use of violence by the Rangers id not bear the desired results. The State will get smarter and already should be well on their way to breaking the unity of the Union. If the WAPDA and other Unions in the country are supporting this movement there should be good chance that the union will continue to make its presence felt. It must continue to do that and it must figure out ways to keep money out of the equation. The ideal has proved to be strong to this point but that is because the State was taken unawares. They will try every trick in the book and will go all-out to infiltrate the Union. It remains to be seen whether the Union will hold its ground.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if PTCL began showing shrinking profits. So far a big criticism of the corporation has been its health. It’s a financially healthy organization, which employs over 60,000 employees and yet manages to show annual profits up to Dollars 30 million. What logic could possibly work in selling the idea of privatization? Parts of WAPDA were sold off into entities like KESCO, IESCO, MESCO, and LESCO etc but the problems that plagued WAPDA now plague these organizations. Instead of finding ways to making performance better in the organization, the solution that we have adopted is to cut off the ailing organization into pieces and hope that they will function well as smaller entities. Time usually tells, and it tells us that this privatization may not be the way out. Why is the idea of privatization being preached as gospel when it’s not proving to be all that it promised to be?

The debate is essentially between Privatization and Nationalization. The debate is also between profiteering and performing. I think that when looking at large state run corporations its more important to look at how many people are provided livelihoods, how many people are serviced and how many families survive off the corporation rather than whether the corporation is profiteering or not. In the case of PTCL, I think its criminal of the state to even think of disbanding an organization that supports tens of thousands of families, feeds hundreds of thousands of mouths and at the same time actually makes supernormal profits.