Wednesday 1 December
Today with twenty or so mainly hosiery and garment workers, day one of a two day course. After a bumpy start with half the class - the women - arriving late, and then the usual nervousness as people slowly get used to being asked to do things in the class, like talk to each other and give reports, everyone starts to enjoy themselves.
We’re in the city’s large and tasteful art centre. There is a hideous ceremony outside with boy scouts saluting dignitaries (whom they’ve been waiting for, standing to attention, for over an hour). It’s the opening of an exhibition of school children’s art work about helping flood relief victims with the motto ‘Charity brings cheer’. The director of the centre, a thoughtful looking man in his sixties, appears. Tariq tells me he’s been in the job 17 years which means he’s politically skilled, able to survive all the political upheavals, using his position to keep in with all the “influentials” as they are called here. You have to know their weaknesses, Tariq says.
It’s a wonderfully determined and spirited group of mainly young workers on the course. The reports people give of what happens at work sound straight out of Engels. The illegally low wages, 5,000 rupees a month (about £10 a week), instead of the legal minimum wage of 7,000, often paid as much as or more than a month late, forced overtime at single time (the law says it should be paid at double time), twelve hour shifts, seven day weeks, harassment of women workers (there is a new law against sexual harassment here, though no reports yet of it making any impact), no first aid facilities, no masks to protect from the dust, no ear protectors to shield from the noise. And these are big factories, usually with hundreds of workers, sometimes thousands. So far there hasn't been any successful unionisation (though there is one company, Interloop, that follows the law, a model employer, a 'New Lanark'). Very interesting to have women students wearing the niqab taking a full part in the course including giving reports from their groups .
We are visited on the course by the weak looking Director of the Labour Department and his nasty looking deputy. Labour Departments have a reputation for taking bribes from employers but can be pressured e.g. by organising demos outside their offices. We are polite but give some tough questions making it clear that we aren't going to rely on him to get our rights, challenging them on the outrageous suspension of inspections of workplaces, ongoing for some years now. My suspicion is that they are here to see how confident the students are and wondering when this is going to turn into a much bigger movement.
In the evening, spent in the home of one of the organisers where I am given some wonderful food, I find out that many of the women had worked a night shift till 5am and then got some sleep before coming. At the end of the meal, Tahir, my host, suggests we go to a wedding. Or rather a Mehndi, a kind of stag night, the night before the actual wedding. A five minute walk brings us to a crowd of young men with music from two drums and a flute where we meet the serious looking groom, perhaps in his late twenties and his (male) friends and also Aslam from the LQM. The groom looks stressed. We enter a courtyard, with a colourful flat sided and topped marquee to give it atmosphere. I sit with Tahir and Aslam, among perhaps a hundred men, more coming in all the time. A large man offers me a drink from a stainless steel jug. As always, I politely decline water unless I’m 100% sure it’s OK. A moment later someone else accepts and then briefly I see the whiskey bottle that’s filled the jug. . Aslam declines as well, but most accept. Looking at the young men dancing, at least one is seriously drunk. The music switches from drums and flute to Indian disco and three keen dancers show off their synchronized routines . Suddenly, there’s a very loud crack and then another, a handgun being fired in the air. I persuade Tahir we need to be fresh for tomorrow and we leave. Tomorrow Aslam tells me that after we leave the police arrested four people, releasing them after a couple of hours.
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