Daily Times

Till late Friday night, Pakistan International Airlines’ (PIA’s) flight operations remained suspended for the third consecutive day with about 350 flights having been cancelled since Tuesday. A ‘high-powered’ team of Sindh Rangers claimed to have found “clues about the presence of miscreants in the crowd”. But the claim was immediately rejected by representatives of the agitating PIA workers who said the ‘masked man’ referred to by the paramilitary force — and shown in a video released by the Rangers — was the airline’s employee who had covered his face to protect himself from teargas shelling. “The workers will continue to protest till the government accepts their demands and abolishes its plan to privatise the airline. We have heard that a committee has been constituted to take steps and issue punitive orders against the protesting workers under the Essential Services Maintenance Act 1952. But we are united and ready to give sacrifices,” Nasrullah Afridi, a spokesman for the Joint Action Committee (JAC) told the press.

The month long national strike and protests by the PIA workers took a dramatic turn on Tuesday, February 2, 2015, when striking workers in Karachi came under live fire from heavy contingents of riot police and paramilitary Rangers at Jinnah International Airport. The clash took place when PIA workers defied a government ban on union activity and observed their planned strike against the privatisation of the national flag carrier. But when the workers at Karachi’s old airport tried to move towards the main terminal tarmac, to stop flights from operating, the brutal state forces resorted to severe violence. Initially, they used water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and batons to disperse the protesters. Failing to stop the marching workers, they resorted to live ammunition. Three protesting workers were killed and more than a dozen injured, including some television reporters.

Sohail Baloch, the chairman of PIA’s JAC, said on Tuesday, “Firing straight at unarmed people is unacceptable. This was from the direct fire of the Rangers and police… we did give a call to suspend flight operations but we did not ground any flights forcibly.” Immediately after this heinous atrocity air traffic across the country came to a near standstill.

Later in the evening events not seen for years unravelled rapidly. The PIA chairman, Nasser Jaffer, resigned from his post, taking full responsibility for the brute use of force against the protesters. The management and the regime attempted to continue some flight activity with pilots hired from private airlines and leased from the Pakistan navy. In addition, they requested a private airline company, Air Blue, to commence special flights from Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad.

This also failed to materialise. As the news spread, the Pakistan International Pilots Association (Palpa) told its members not to proceed to any airport in the country. Pilots, cabin crew and flight dispatchers, who had earlier reported to work, started walking away. Officials’ fears came true when the engineering department, which besides aircraft overhauls is responsible for checking planes before every flight, technically brought the airline to its knees.

Privatisation of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in Pakistan has a long and convoluted history. Like the privatisation of Pakistan Steel, PIA’s sell-off has emerged as very complicated and controversial. The $ 6.7 billion IMF loan programme came with very harsh and stringent conditions. To honour its commitment to the IMF, the PML-N government announced that it was going to privatise 69 SOEs. PIA was one of the 39 entities marked for ‘early implementation’. Twenty-six percent of PIA’s shares were to be offered to ‘strategic investors’ by the end of December 2014. Then again, due to opposition, this was postponed. In August 2015, under pressure from the IMF the government resolved to privatise PIA by March 2016.

This was the reason why Nawaz Sharif unilaterally ignoring the possibility of resistance by employees promulgated a presidential ordinance late in the evening of December 4, 2015. The Pakistan International Airlines Corporation (Conversion) Ordinance, 2015 had one aim and that was to turn the national carrier into a public limited company for privatisation. However, the PML-N government was forced to withdraw the ordinance and instead introduced a bill in parliament.

In January, a bill was bulldozed through the National Assembly (NA) to convert the Pakistan International Airlines Corporation (PIAC) into a public limited company as Pakistan International Airlines Company Limited (PIACL). PIACL will get all the assets, liabilities, duties and obligations of PIA. The Nawaz government undoubtedly has gone overboard and bypassed due process, crushing the voice of the employees. When the PIA unions and associations went on strike, the government used the Essential Services Maintenance Act 1952 making the measure a precursor of the present strike. There was even an uproar from the bourgeois opposition parties to this drastic act that could provoke the working class. The present regime is the classical representative of the Pakistan bourgeois and is carrying out its aggressive anti-workers policies in a period of relative lull.

The truth is that PML-N’s privatisation agenda is in trouble. Privatisation has been a disaster across the globe leading to huge corruption, asset stripping, monopoly creation, increased inequality, cronyism, redundancies and losses of consumer and employee welfare. Evaluations of the previous privatisation carried out by the Nawaz neo-liberal regime reveal major issues including corruption, nepotism, sale at low prices to cronies and, in many cases, we have witnessed this regime and its prominent individuals facilitating the formation of cartels particularly in the banking and cement sectors and, more importantly, wholesale redundancies and attacks on wages and social security benefits.

The current regime is well aware of its weaknesses and this also explains why it had to resort to the use of the Essential Services (Maintenance) Act 1952 for six months. Speaking to reporters after the enforcement of the act, Information Minister Pervez Rashid on Monday said those continuing the strike would be treated as enemies of PIA and Pakistan, and they would end up losing their jobs.” The Essential Services (Maintenance) Act 1952 essentially restricts union activity in public organisations including railways, postal services, telephone and affiliated services, and airports and seaports. The same act was also invoked by this government in January 2013 during the young doctors’ strike for an end to temporary contracts and better wages. The Sharif brothers utilised every legal and security avenue against the young doctors. However, the young doctors, despite unprecedented harassment, attacks and vilification maintained their unity and linked up with other health workers, ultimately succeeding in defeating the government.

PIA’s current state of affairs, particularly financial losses, are due to the government’s own flawed policies and lack of efficient leadership. PIA has an accumulated debt of Rs 300 billion and incurs annual losses of Rs 30 billion. These losses became more prominent when the country’s skies were opened to foreign airlines, especially from the Gulf region, to do business in the country. Airlines such as Emirates and Gulf Air quickly ate into PIA’s market share and revenues.

(To be continued)

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