Daily Times

There is no hiding away from the fact that Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) needs a massive injection of capital to keep the company going. There are very few capitalist vultures willing to gamble their wealth on such a project. They will hardly find any buyers of this huge and consciously damaged and depreciated institution as a whole. Successive regimes have attempted to sell it to their cronies at throwaway prices. The Nawaz regime’s experts and their imperialist masters will try to break the corporation into various components in order for it to be sold to the highest bidder. The workforce has already been chopped from 19,000 to 14,000. After its privatisation the workers will be the first victims, starting with redundancies. This will very quickly move to attacks on wages, health and benefits.

The protracted privatisation process of PIA has faced several resistance struggles by workers in the last decade-and-a-half. But this strike has so far outshone previous struggles. It has received the attention of society and the working class in particular. The ferocity and sacrifices of the struggle have forced the media to give it coverage. Although corporate bosses, news editors and their anchors have tried to cover other non-issues, so intense has been the mass interest in this strike coming with a ferocity not seen in years, that their ratings crashed when they tried to divert attention from this militant struggle of the PIA workers. However, the corporate media has systematically watered down the coverage after the first 36 hours of the strike. But the initial thrust with which this strike gripped media headlines proves that when workers move into the arena of struggle with the power of class unity, media moguls and their hirelings are reduced to a state of impotency and fail miserably to undermine the interest and enthusiasm of the workers and youth in society.

The strike started about six weeks ago, initially after a relatively low-key protest by the workers. Soon the pent up hatred and revulsion against privatisation, renewed instincts and charged energy to fight for the protection of jobs and basic rights started to become more and more pronounced. The Joint Action Committee (JAC), formed from representatives of the different unions of PIA, linked to all sorts of political parties from the Islamist fundamentalists to the PPP, were united by the pressure of the rising working class tide of struggle from below.

The demand on which this struggle was launched was based on the following PIA employees’ four-point agenda: a) the government should immediately rescind the bill passed on January 21, converting the national flag carrier into a public limited company, b) PIA’s employees should be provided a chance to reform the airline. If the employees fail to do so, the government will have the freedom to do whatever it finds suitable, c) privatisation, in any form, whether it is in the form of a strategic partner or selling of 36 percent or one percent of the organisation’s shares, is not acceptable to the employees, and d) the government should immediately review the aviation policy and form a committee for this purpose, comprising members from the PIA employees’ JAC, along with PIA experts Khursheed Anwar, Kamran Hassan and Salahuddin.

There were many obstacles and weaknesses faced by PIA workers in the current struggle, ranging from the lack of one united union to the isolation of this struggle from workers of the private and unorganised industrial sectors. More importantly, the isolation from the workers in state enterprises like the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), Railways, postal services and telecommunications that are also threatened with similar privatisations and redundancies, is more crucial. Such obstacles will be set aside once the workers enter the arena of militant struggle with a renewed courage and determination. Hence, it is vital that this isolation, unity and solidarity with the workers of other industries and institutions be built rapidly. On Wednesday morning, after the horrific killing of the two PIA workers, meetings have taken place bringing together leaders of unions ranging from WAPDA, electricity, Railways, postal and telecommunications. Railways and some other institutions’ workers are now announcing to join this strike wave.

The current situation requires a much wider and bolder approach by the genuine leaders of the workers. It is a historical obligation of the leaders and trade union activists to support the PIA strike. A united front has to be created to force this ‘democratic’ government to stop making gifts to its cronies and its class. A united front of state-owned enterprises’ unions in conjunction with other unions in the public and private sector, and progressive political forces should call for a complete general strike. There is a need to have a programme of action to mobilise the workers and youth of all industries, students and peasants for a victorious general strike. Enterprises under public control not only should be defended, but workers must demand that these should be placed under democratic control of the workers.

Several opposition political parties’ leaders are visiting the offices and camps of the striking PIA workers. All solidarity is welcome but any intrigue or manoeuvre by political manipulators to make any rotten compromise should be forcefully rejected and quashed. Extraordinary sympathy prevails among the workers throughout the country. This situation may not last long. A successful general strike will not only bring the regime to its knees but the entry of other workers will boost the courage of the PIA workers to move forward and defeat privatisation and other attacks of the bourgeois, imperialism and the brutal capitalist state. However, without the strike entering into the political arena from the initial economic demands can the working class move towards achieving its revolutionary destination of emancipation? Leon Trotsky wrote, “The general strike is only a mobilisation of the proletariat and its setting up against its enemy, the state but the strike in itself cannot produce the solution of the problem because it exhausts the forces of the proletariat sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or later, forces the workers to return to the factories. The general strike acquires decisive importance only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois state. The general strike produces the mobilisation of both sides and gives the first serious estimate of the powers of resistance of the counterrevolution.”

A tactical retreat by the Nawaz government will not solve the burning and multi-issues faced by PIA and other state-owned enterprises. Neither privatisation nor the current status quo is a solution. In the final analysis these attacks can only be decisively defeated by linking this struggle to the transformation of the socio-economic system through a socialist revolution. Such a historic victory of the proletariat in Pakistan will usher in an era of struggles and revolutions yet unforeseen on the South Asian subcontinent.

(Concluded)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com