In the shadow of the life imprisonment of six workers in Faisalabad, their families are struggling to survive. I met some of their wives and mothers who told us their story, struggling to keep their families going between visits to the prison and the tension of not having enough to feed their children.
Rafiqua Bibi lives in a village in the outskirts of Faisalabad. Like many people who have worked too hard and for too long, it is difficult to guess her age. We sit with her in a dark room while intrigued children watch us from the courtyard. She explains to us that three of her sons have recently been accused by the factory owners of being part of the 150 unknown persons against whom a case was registered in July last year. To avoid suffering the same fate as their unjustly detained co-workers, they preferred to run away. Someone visited her once to tell her that they are alive and safe but that is all she knows. She says that the police has been harassing her to get information: “They raided our house many times. Once they started beating me up. Luckily, the neighbours got alarmed and rushed in to protect me. They forced the police to leave.” She understands it is better for her not to know where her sons are… She herself is a political activist and supports the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM): “I go to their office and help organizing public meetings and rallies with women. A lot of women in our neighbourhood support the movement.”
Back in the busy streets of Faisalabad, in the area where the power loom factories are. Not really the image we have of an industrial area, with its small lanes and its children working on the machines, their hair full of cotton. This is Rafia Bibi’s house, her husband Asghar is one of the six who have been condemned to spend the rest of their days in prison. Rafia is suffering from a speech disorder that makes it difficult for her to talk. She does not seem to realize how the arrest of her husband is linked with his activism for the workers’ rights. While she knows her husband has done nothing wrong, she thinks he got arrested because of the fight that broke out at the complainants’ factory last year. She and her sister, who is also sitting with us, seem resigned to what they probably appreciate as being the norm: unjustified arrests and detentions of workers. While Asghar and Rafia have only one 15 year-old daughter, six other children live in the household and Asghar was the main breadwinner of the joint family. A little further on we find Faisal’s house, another one of the six in jail. His wife has gone to visit him but we met his mother, Nazeera Bibi, who insists that we should have a cold drink despite the two glasses of Sprite we’ve just had while visiting the previous families. At the same time she tells us how bad she feels about not being able to take food to her son in jail: “Since he was shifted to another detention centre after the judgment we cannot take anything to him.” She tells us about Faisal’s children: “He has three sons, no daughters. Since his father was jailed, we had to stop sending the younger one to school, we could no longer afford to pay for it.” And when you ask them what they think of the Labour Qaumi Movement, all the wives and mothers are unanimous: they support it of course! The truth is that it represents the only hope for the families of power loom workers in their quest to build a different future for their children.
Munir Ahmad, received us in his small office, where we asked him about his work with the movement.. After Faisal’s arrest, no one was willing to take his post of local sector president. Nothing surprising given that some of the local presidents in other sectors who had been appointed to replace the jailed one got charged in the same case. But after Azeem, one of the senior members of LQM took this position for some months, Munir accepted to take over and became the de facto elected sector president. Munir is a middle-aged man who has worked in power looms factories for 15 years. We asked him the structure of his organization and about the work he does: “We have one person nominated in each factory, if the workers are facing a problem, they talk to them. If the problem cannot be solved at the factory level, they come to one of the sector’s offices. We are, in all, 14 activists who work full-time for the movement. Our salaries are paid by the contributions of the workers, each of them donating Rs. 20 a week. We receive between Rs. 8,000 and 10,000 a month, depending on the workers’ contributions. [While Munir talks to us, a young man enters the office to hand over his Rs. 20 contribution.] You see, we do not even need to go and collect the money in the factories, the workers spontaneously come to our office to give their contribution. The main problems faced by the workers are related to the non-payment of part of their salaries or arbitrary firings. When someone comes to me which such an issue, I go and talk with the factory owners. Our movement has grown strong and they are scared of it so we are in a position to negotiate with them.” And when negotiations are not enough, they organize protests and rallies. They have huge popular support and the last jalsa they organized in protest against the life sentences of their members gathered over 5,000 people. Old enmities, castes and political background have for long divided the workers but LQM seems to have been able to reunite them under a common banner. They now know that united they can stand against the factory owners but, as shown by the example of those in jail now, it is not only against the factory owners that they have to fight but against a whole system that sustains injustice. We can only hope that others will join them in the struggle they’ve embarked upon.
Cindy Zahnd