Progressive International’s Tanya Singh spoke to Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (People’s Rights Party, HKP) co-founder Ammar Ali Jan about the challenges of building a new workers’ party in Pakistan — and the HKP’s recent victories for Lahore’s most vulnerable workers.
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The HKP has existed for two years now. What were some of the challenges in building the new workers’ party in Pakistan?
A few things moved us in the direction of setting up a party. One, the old left that still existed, despite its glorious past, had lost its vitality, its energy. It had become more of a nostalgic hub for old comrades, rather than something that looked towards the future. And the old contradictions and internal fights were carried into the present.
The second was that other left groups were very much inclined towards the immediate gratification of social movements. You know, there's this belief that the working class as a subject will spontaneously arrive on the stage of history — an eruption that will carry forward the organisation of the left. We have a very strong critique of that idea. We don't think social movements necessarily lean to the left or the right.
As we know from the Arab Spring and many other movements that have emerged in the last decades, the political content of a movement is defined by organisations that are anchored in the masses.
What’s more important than waiting for a social movement is to do the work — the organisational work, the work of building institutions — prior to any such social eruption, and then political strategising after. With that understanding, we changed our method and we started organising deeply within working-class communities. That was another major difference that we had, that we wanted to build institutions and have a sustained presence among the working class.
The third is a question of subjectivity. We also had to present an affirmative narrative and an affirmative program. We needed to delineate a strategy towards achieving that program — towards winning. What that requires is understanding the movement of history at a given conjuncture, seeing what possibilities arise out of it, and using the existing tendencies of history to pursue the political projects that you want to pursue. You have to embed yourself in the movement of history.
For that, we were very clear that we needed to build a program on which we can fight elections.
Can you tell us about your recent workers’ conference in Lahore?
In the last year and a half, we contested elections from this working-class area. Our primary motivation for running was that we wanted to build a base among the working people.
It has been a long time since the left has actually built a base in any industrial, working-class area. In the election, we got 2.5% of the vote. But the more important thing was that we built linkages that had been absent for a very long time because the left had turned into a very small group of alienated intellectuals.
This was an attempt to form that connection between ideas and the people. And we managed to build a workers’ office. We managed to build a health clinic. We managed to build a training centre. And through that, we started engaging with workers from the industrial area — factory workers.
The minimum wage last year in Pakistan was PKR 32,000, which today would mean about $120 (A$176) per month. These workers were getting PKR 16,000, or $60 (A$88). That was, of course, a major scandal.
So we organised the workers. And we ended up winning a government intervention. We got their wages increased from PKR 16,000 to 23,000 (A$122), which was the biggest jump since 2001.
This year, again, the government announced that the minimum wage would rise to PKR 37,000 (A$196). And then there was another round of education that the workers did. And one of the people who really stood out as a leader of the workers was this young man, Maulana Shahbaz — a worker and a religious cleric. He’s a very interesting character.
For a very long time, he was telling people to accept their fate as given to them by Allah. We have to bear this pain, the suffering. But the moment they realised that there was a party now that was willing to take a stand with them — a party with lawyers, intellectuals and contacts in the media — they transformed.
Working class movements always produce their own leaders. They have their own organic leadership that understands the problems of the workers, and the details that cosmopolitan intellectuals can never understand. And they connect in a very direct way with workers. But they need some kind of backing from people who they know will stand with them in difficult times.
So this guy started organising. The word started spreading and we are now active in about eight to ten factories across Lahore and more recently in Gujranwala. We were involved in a strike as well. And in every place, we won victories and an increased minimum wage.
Recently, we decided to bring all these workers together for a labour conference. Maulana Shahbaz, I should mention, is from the Chawla factory and the labour conference brought together workers from there, as well as Infinity Engineers and power loom workers. They were the ones leading the event.
And it was beautiful to see the kind of clarity that they displayed in explaining their situation. For example, one of the workers said that it’s interesting that whenever the notification of a rise in the minimum wage comes, it takes months before the government can implement it. And sometimes it’s not implemented at all. Workers have to fight for it to get implemented. But when a notification about an increase in petrol prices comes, it is implemented within hours.
With the minimum wage that you mentioned, it must be impossible for workers and their families to pay?
Basically, the country, even the middle class, has defaulted. The working class is now living totally on the edge. At this point, it’s a calculation by the state about how many people can they afford to let die. It’s social murder. The nutritional values have gone down. About 40% of kids are now stunted. There’s a 40–41% poverty rate, which has gone up from 30%. It’s basically de-development. Over 40% of our budget is going to repay loans.
Maulana Shahbaz was one of the main people who spoke [at the conference] and spoke really well. The next day he was fired from the factory. And that’s what triggered our campaign. The workers found out about 15 minutes later. Within another five minutes they stopped their work and came out in solidarity. This was unprecedented, and the workers staged a sit-in which continued for over a week.
The owner tried to kick all the workers out of the hostels as well. So we had multiple fights: One to sustain the unity of the workers at the dharna [sit-in]. Then we had to defend their homes. And then we also had to create enough of a buzz on social and other media so that the factory owners felt pressured.
We had found out in the negotiations with the Chawla factory that they were planning to shut down the factory for a few months. They hoped to kick out Maulana Shahbaz and then kick out everybody else and give them the PKR 23,000 minimum wage as severance.
But the negotiations that we led after this fight led to the highest golden handshake in the industrial area since at least the seventies. That’s what we're being told.
That has really increased the confidence of the workers.
Have there been any specific strategies that HKP has adopted to ensure compliance from employers, while also protecting workers from further retaliation?
One of the strategies is that we have a major working-class leader, who I think is probably the most important trade union leader right now in Pakistan. His name is Baba Latif, President of the Punjab chapter of HKP.
He never completed his schooling and comes from a very humble background, but he is one of the fiercest orators, activists and labour leaders. And he’s the one who has won these victories over the last few weeks.
The party’s job is to stand with the leadership of the working class and to work with them so that they start becoming the leadership of HKP. If the HKP is to become a representative of the working class, then it must have in its leadership a sizeable number of working-class leaders who have a mass following.
Now, of course, in terms of understanding the problems of the workers and connecting with them, these working-class leaders have both experience and a natural gift. But the party can also help them operate at a different level, which is to say that many of them don’t understand the language of the law, many of them aren’t necessarily oriented towards the left.
But this is never a one-way process. It’s a two-way process where they are teaching us more. Eventually, the purpose of this collaboration has to be the development of working-class leadership.
One of the things that we were constantly reiterating during the sit-ins is that workers have to start thinking of themselves as being connected to other workers. So it’s not just individual factories. That’s one of the reasons why we did the labour conference — so that workers from different factories come together and see the similarities.
If you have the numbers on your side, then the pressure is enormous on the administration, because it’s not easy to arrest people when you have hundreds of them fighting over something like the minimum wage, right?
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