Working with the LQM in Faisalabad

Sunday 28 November, Lahore to Faisalabad
A quiet day ending with a two and a half hours drive from Lahore to Faisalabad, the ‘Manchester of Pakistan’ with up to half a million textile workers. It’s a straight flat road into the setting sun across the dusty but fertile Punjab plain, through small towns and past a few very large factories. Wherever there is water, there is an explosion of green.

The next two days are with the power loom workers union, Labour Qaumi Movement, LQM, followed by two days with a group of home based and other informal sector workers. Late on Sunday we talk with a couple of LQM activists about what they’ve been doing over the last year and what we are going to do on the course. This includes battles between a thousand strikers and the police in July. Four members are still in jail. They come up with the idea of electing me as their international representative. I explain I’m honoured but there is already a global union federation of textile, leather and garment workers. Perhaps we could organise a trade union link on May Day between Faisalabad and Manchester.

Monday 29 November, Faisalabad
Fifteen or so senior LQM officers on the course but very few women. The LQM has about 20,000 members, almost all on insecure jobs without proper contracts. Many own their looms, working in their own homes as subcontractors. Before we start, I’m given a letter written by Samina, secretary of the LQM’s women’s section. Her mother has suddenly died and the funeral is today.

Our first activity is writing the history of the union over the last 12 months, picking the most important events, a strike over pay, with demos and battles with the police, a campaign against power cuts (which stop them working) and another against the bulldozing of people’s houses, a different group works on each one, putting a summary on a flip chart. They’ve won all these battles.

Then we are joined by six women, all home based workers. At first they say little and then a woman glove maker, working at home, makes a passionate speech about how they are robbed day in, day out by the middlemen, who pay 5 rupees (4 pence) for sewing a dozen pairs of gloves, an hour’s work. She goes on to explain how some of the women have had to lie to their husbands about what they were doing today so they could come on the course.

This evening, relaxing with Tariq and Aslam, LQM secretary, I find how the LQM has the respect of at least some of the employers. Suddenly, the chair of the power loom employers, Waheed, appears in the hotel. Excellent English, elegantly turned out and most polite, he stops for twenty minutes or so to pay his respects, show how keen he is “to have good relations with the LQM and tell us how grim the future looks, especially for small power loom workers.