Pakistan’s ship-breakers strike

TODAY, AS the Pakistani government hurtles itself along the path of IMF-mandated austerity, working people around the country find themselves bearing the ever-steeper costs of a capitalist crisis not of their own making. The ordered withdrawal of government subsidies of basic staples--as well as the effects of global and local slowdown--have meant an environment of sharp cuts to real wages and rapidly heightening job insecurity.

Yet even while the Pakistani left lacks the infrastructure to combat this onslaught head-on, in the most underdeveloped and oppressed province of the country, several thousands of workers have taken dramatic action to this end.

In mid-June, some 15,000 ship-breaking workers--organized into the Gadani Ship-Breaking Democratic Workers' Union (GSBDWU), which is affiliated to the National Trade Union Federation (NTUF)--went on a two-day strike in protest of the accumulating injustices of treacherous working conditions, low wages and torturous working hours.

At the end of June, the union announced an end to on-again, off-again negotiations with the Owners' Association. Because a promised agreement heeding their several demands was not hammered out by the deadline set when the earlier strike was suspended, the GSBDWU boldly renewed their strike on July 5, with plans to continue until their demands are met.

Interestingly enough, despite crises in other national industries, ship-breaking in Gadani has actually seen a boon in business over the past two years, owing partly to a government decision to cut the import duty on arriving ships. Moreover, the worldwide crisis has even benefited yard owners, as a slumping shipping industry has been discarding defunct ships at lower-than-usual prices.

In late June, a report in the business section of Dawn (pitched from the perspective of the owners, of course, and making no mention of the workers' struggle) noted that a record total of 107 ships had been beached for scrap in the current fiscal year.

All together, this represented 852,022 tons of scrap (compared to 778,598 tons last year), a figure approaching the million tons annually that in the early 1980s made Gadani the world's foremost ship-breaking site.

The intervening decades saw it surpassed by sites in India and Bangladesh (in the first 10 months of 2001, for example, the shipyard only scrapped 160,000 tons). Even still, it retains far superior levels of productivity: whereas a ship of 5,000 tons takes more than six months to dismantle in India or Bangladesh, a customs official claims that in Gadani, the same ship could be broken down in 30 to 45 days, according to the Dawn report.

According to the union, this recovery has gone hand-in-hand with super-profits for the yard's owners. In a recent press conference held while negotiations were still ongoing, representatives from GSBDWU highlighted in some detail the miniscule fraction of total revenue that accrues to workers. An additional chunk--roughly as high as a third of the amount made by the workers--is taken by the contractor.

It scarcely needs to be reiterated that the rampant inflation of recent years has rendered the workers' share in wages entirely inadequate. Moreover, at the press conference, it was added that workers find themselves pitilessly exploited as consumers, too--food in the few canteens made available to them sells at extortionate prices.

ARGUABLY EVEN more damning than these levels of exploitation, though, are the horrific conditions in which Gadani's workers toil.

The absence of safety equipment and regulations has been the central tenet of the union's recent campaign--workers are denied goggles, harnesses, belts, etc., and there are no emergency medical facilities in the near vicinity. As a result, a staggering 18 workers have died on the job in this year alone--the most recent man was only 25 years old. He fell to his death while climbing an oil-coated ladder in near-darkness last week.

Indeed, the ship-breaking industry has long been notorious in this regard--the environmental and health hazards of dismantling ships laden with toxic chemicals, coupled with the frightening dangers of the work itself, were the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of U.S. scrap yards in 1997.

In it, a North Carolina assistant attorney general likened a site to "one of Dante's levels of hell." (The author of the exposé mentioned that much of the work was in the process of being outsourced to South Asia, where those safety and environmental regulations that did exist in the U.S. were nowhere to be found.)

In their struggle for these elementary safety provisions and reasonable compensation, the workers at Gadani, of course, find themselves confronted not only by an intransigent, greedy Owners' Association, but also by the full force of the Pakistani state.

In this case, the state's well-theorized subservience to capital is perhaps best exemplified by the billion rupees the industry contributed to the national treasury in the last fiscal year.

According to union activists, even the local establishment shares the owners' concerns, as the elite that staffs it makes a small fortune by renting shoreline plots to the companies at the shipyard. The strike two weeks ago was thus met with uncompromising repression--dozens of workers were beaten and tear-gassed, and five representatives of the union arrested. Tellingly, the Anti-Terrorism Task Force was deployed in addition to the police (nothing quite like the "war on terror," after all--the gift that keeps on giving).

It is unclear, then, what will unfold in the days ahead. On the one hand, the intransigence of the Owners' Association is hardly encouraging--their ongoing failure to offer anything more than piecemeal concessions (a 20 percent pay raise had been proposed a few days ago, but the union's demand is fixed at 100 percent) and safety provisions bespeaks confidence in their own ability to ride out the strike (with the aid of the state's repressive arms, of course).

On the other hand, the GSBDWU seems uniquely well-organized--the fact that a workforce of mixed ethnicities employed at worksites dispersed across 13 kilometers of coastline observed a total strike two weeks ago should inspire us with some confidence.

The decision to organize an indefinite strike, moreover, was taken at a meeting attended by representatives from all of these sites. The scale of these injustices have called forth a depth of commitment that, one hopes, it will be hard for the state and capital to suppress.

In these difficult times, then, we wait. If the strike in Gadani succeeds, it promises to offer the rest of the Pakistani working-class a striking, contemporary example of the power the majority wield against the few.