Farooq Tariq, Lahore
A criminal case was registered against 60 leaders of the Pakistan Bhatta Mazdoor Union (covering brick kiln workers) on January 24 in Qasur. Their only crime was organising a rally. Police claimed the slogans raised by the workers — which demanded higher wages and labour department registration of the brick-kiln factories — were "provocative".
On January 23, more than 1200 workers gathered at Qasur and marched from the office of the assistant director of the labour department. Carrying banners, posters and red flags, they marched over five kilometres through the city to the district courts.
Outside the courts, they staged a sit-in on one side of the road, where short speeches were made by union leaders and also by Labour Party Pakistan (LPP) leaders in support of the union's demands.
The local police chief invited us for negotiations and arranged a meeting with the assistant director of labour, who accepted the union's demands as genuine and promised to assist.
The next day, we were informed by the national media that a case had been registered against 60 activists of the union, including its national secretary Mehmood Butt.
Butt was a union leader at the steel factory owned by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in the 1980s. Butt was kicked out of the factory for forming a union, brutally beaten up and dismissed from his job. He became active in left politics and was a founding member of the LPP in 1997. In 2004, alongside other LPP supporters, he started Pakistan's first national union of brick-kiln workers.
The Pakistan Bhatta Mazdoor Union has offices in Lahore and Hyderabad and membership is growing day by day. The union helped force the government to agree to a substantial wage increase in December, but the rise hasn't been implemented.
The union has also helped to free hundreds of brick-kiln workers from bonded labour through court orders during the last two years. There are 1.8 million workers in brick kiln factories. Most of them work under inhuman conditions and the majority are like bonded labour because of the peshgi system. Under this system, the bosses offer advance money to workers, who cannot leave until they repay the whole amount. Most of the workers are illiterate and they do not know how much money is being repaid. Bosses take advantage of this and impose many so-called fines on workers. One of the main demands of the January 23 rally was an end to the peshgi system.
A social movement under the leadership of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front in the late '80s forced the courts to take notice and the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered an end to the peshgi system in 1988. The Bonded Labour Abolition Act 1992 was then introduced. The bosses then went to the Islamic Shariat Court opposing this ruling on the grounds that the act was "un-Islamic".
On January 25, three labour leaders were granted bail by a local court in Qasur until February 4. The rest of the 60 activists have not been named, giving police the leeway to arrest anyone. The union has called all members to the court on February 4.
Protest letters can be faxed to the Qasur police chief at +92 492 9250172 and a copy to +92 42 6271149.
[Farooq Tariq is the general secretary of the LPP. Visit <http://www.laborpakistan.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 8, 2006.
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