PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBAN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Of the rich academic literature that has emerged on the growth and dynamism of the “informal economy” in South Asia in recent years very little work has focused on the Pakistani context. This article builds upon the growing body of work on “informal employment” by identifying and explaining modes of labor control in the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan. The crucial role of the subcontractor and his exploitative relationship with workers is discussed in a Gramscian framework. Workers are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship with contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependency that contractors have nurtured. Against the backdrop of the shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation regimes, the author argues that the present conjuncture is marked by the prevalence of extra-economic forms of control such that workers conceive of contractors as patrons. The instrumentalization of cultural norms of reciprocity by contractors does not mean that the labor–capital relationship is unchanging and rooted in “culture.” In fact, personalized patronage networks coexist with impersonal market ethics dynamically so as to produce and sustain the hegemony of capital.

Notes

^1. The term “informal economy” is now increasingly replacing “informal sector.” The change reflects an acknowledgment of the historical realities of actually existing capitalism. Recent scholarship has even expanded the terms of the debate and posited the existence within the informal economy of a “non-capitalist production space,” or what can be thought of as a “need economy.” See Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009.

^2. Scholars such as Sassia Sassken (2001) have illustrated how rapid informalization is taking place in the citadels of global capitalism such as New York City.

^3. International Labour Organization 2002. By informal labor I mean workers who do not enjoy legal recognition and entitlements, often work without written contracts, and, with exceptions, are not collectively organized. Examples include self-employed vendors, landless wage laborers in rural areas, and subcontracted workers of the kind I document in this article.

^4. Such a perspective requires an in-depth analysis of the “composition, causes and consequences” of informal employment arrangements. See Chen et al. 2006: 2132–33.

^5. For our purposes, “informal employment” refers to wage employment without the security of tenure or protection under formal law, and, additionally, widespread subcontracting practices.

^6. The research on surgical instruments and powerlooms was in two cities: Sialkot and Faisalabad, respectively. Housing construction was in Islamabad/Rawalpindi.

^7. Harriss-White 2003 and 2005.

^8. While I have mentioned the “intermediate classes,” my purpose here is not to engage at length with the question of how much power the “intermediate classes” exercise within the social formation at large, which was the subject of most of the seminal works on the subject, including that of Kalecki (1972). Harriss-White's book-length study also contains a detailed discussion on the “intermediate regime” (IR) formulation. My focus is the specific relations cultivated by contractors with workers and how this system of patronage inhibits/facilitates a politics of class.

^9. Harvey 1989.

^11. Harvey 1989, 147–52.

^10. In short, the new accumulation regime glossed over the crisis of overproduction through liberalized financial markets, thereby freeing capital from the constraints of welfarism and state regulation. The bargaining power of labor was reduced both in the North and South. The impositions of the international financial institutions (IFIs) ensured that already dependent economies such as Pakistan were made even more vulnerable to the vagaries of international markets, and workers lost ground in the class struggle against capital.

^12. A comprehensive shift in the manufacturing industry in Pakistan took place during the eleven-year-long Zia dictatorship (1977–88). The decade and a half or so before Zia took over was a period of unabashed labor militancy in Pakistan in metropolitan centers such as Karachi (Ali 2005). Workers were able to organize within large industrial units, particularly in the textiles industry. By the middle of the 1970s big industry started to suffer the effects of structural contradictions as well as the nationalizations of private factories effected by the populist Pakistan People's Party (PPP) government. The results included overemployment and capital flight (Noman 1988). While workers had been subject to a significant amount of repression during the period of militancy, the existence of large industrial towns facilitated comparable resistance. With the decline in the industry and the beginning of a process of fragmentation, the situation changed qualitatively.

^13. In the broadest terms, impersonal exchange norms predominate between sellers and buyers in the marketplace and between individual citizens and state institutions.

^14. Having said this, there is now a detailed enough literature on working-class history that asserts the centrality of norms and networks in shaping the formally impersonal exchange patterns that prevail in the North. I would suggest that a strict binary between northern and southern societies is problematic and it is more apt to distinguish them in relative terms. See also footnote 16 below.

^15. For a comprehensive discussion on the politicization of such identities in British India, see Dirks 2001.

^16. To the same extent, of course. I have noted above that inWestern societies the capital–labor relation has never been completely impersonal in the sense of the ideal-type. There is, nevertheless, a clear difference between the relatively more impersonal exchange norms that prevail in Western societies and the much more personalized forms of exchange in southern societies such as Pakistan (even while there is considerable variation within the South itself).

^18. Harriss-White 2003, 41.

^17. For a good overview of the academic debate on patron–client relations, see Roniger and Gunes-Ayata 1994.

^19. Agarwala 2006; 2008.

^20. Chun 2009.

^21. Scott 1985.

^22. Here I think it is important to discuss briefly Partha Chatterjee's recent work (2004) on what he calls the “politics of the governed” in which he posits in a manner not dissimilar to Agarwala that subordinate class politics in southern societies such as India is now based around the idiom of governmental welfare. Chatterjee argues that this domain of “political society” is distinct from the classical liberal domain of “civil society,” which eulogizes legality and bourgeois conceptions of rights. Furthermore, he contends, the subordinate classes that reside in “political society” have learned how to secure governmental welfare benefits in their own distinctive way. I feel that Chatterjee understates the retreat of working-class politics of a bygone era while overstating the political savvy and bargaining power of those who reside in “political society.”

^23. Ali (2005) notes that even at the height of the Pakistani labor movement in Karachi in the early 1970s, exclusive identities, and particularly ethnicity, were often in competition with an expansive class identity. The existence of a class politics, which eventually suffered a precipitous decline, ensured that patronage politics was not hegemonic in that particular conjuncture.

^24. Khan 2000, 589.

^25. Chun (2009) discusses at length in the preface of her book how the militant and apparently unified South Korean formal trade union movement, which defied the general trend till as late as the early part of the last decade, eventually succumbed to the material and discursive logic of flexible accumulation.

^26. See Harriss-White (2005, 114) again here: “Capital is far from dissolving or destroying caste. While it might appear that caste is neither occupationally determining nor an entry barrier, in actual fact, control over the biggest local capitals is restricted to a narrow band of castes.… At best caste is being reworked as an economic force (sometimes as capital, sometimes cross class but rather rarely as labour) while at worst caste is a more powerful social stratifier than class.”

^27. The World Bank estimated in 1995 that services accounted for two-thirds of the world's gross domestic product, up from half a decade earlier. See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 2000.

^28. United Nations Population Fund 2009.

^29. “Informalization” has also been acute in the agrarian economy where an estimated 30 million people are now landless. Changing tenure relations in land have given rise to a massive reserve army of agricultural wage labor (Zaidi 2005, 123).

^30. Gennari 2004, 5–10.

^31. In 2010 the Pakistani parliament passed legislation to change NWFP's name to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

^32. Addleton, 1992; Lefebvre, 1999.

^33. Between 2007 and early 2011 alone, Islamabad's population increased from 1.2 million to 1.33 million, an increase of 10.8 percent. See www.mopw.gov.pk/PopulationDynamicsByProvince.aspx (accessed 23 February 2011).

^34. Government statistics indicate that foreign remittances increased by 26.8 percent in the 2000s (Government of Pakistan 2010).

^35. Oda 2009, 8–12.

^36. National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 38.

^37. For a trade union to be registered with the Labour Department in any one commercial enterprise, the prescribed requirement is a minimum of ten formally employed workers. In many cases even if an enterprise employs ten or more workers, fewer than ten are formally registered.

^38. See Sen 2002.

^39. This work was done for the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), based in Karachi.

^40. I did not plan in advance to establish this distinction, however in the course of my fieldwork it became obvious that there are significant differences in the attitudes and practices of migrant and local workers as well as the way contractors treat each group.

^41. The term “contractor economy” is courtesy of Gazdar (2004).

^42. My findings about contractors correspond to the general thrust of a book-length study by De Neve (2005) about upward social mobility in the informal textile production industry in Tamil Nadu.

^43. This is similar yet different from the contractor in the power looms and surgical instruments industries where the established ustad-shagird (teacher–apprentice) system is in operation. Only after an extensive apprenticeship is one able to rise through the ranks, possibly becoming a patron to numerous workers and establishing a reputation as a reliable contractor.

^44. When contractors take on smaller jobs such as renovations of homes in which major construction work is not required, they refuse to purchase materials because the scale of the operation allows for a very small profit margin. In this case their function is solely to provide the necessary labor.

^45. In the incidents to which I was witness, the contractor did not pay his worker on time or less than the agreed amount. When workers protested, however meekly, the contractor employed his police contact to scare the workers with penal action. The workers then paid bribes to the police functionaries to avoid being implicated in a criminal case. Both the contractor and police functionary emerged beneficiaries.

^46. For example, the term bhai (brother) is often used by both parties. Where there is a noticeable age gap between two individuals involved in a transaction, the younger party employs the term chacha (father's younger brother).

^47. Throughout my relatively long period of interaction with contractors, the only time they expressed any nervousness about my activities was when they found out that I was meeting with workers separately from them. They were immediately suspicious that I might incite the workers against them.

^48. Over the course of my fieldwork I came to concur completely with the contention of Bourdieu et al. (1999, 610) that the most successful ethnographic research among subaltern groups takes place when the interviewer and interviewee are “interchangeable.” In other words it is crucial to dispense with the delusion of perfect impartiality.

^49. I interacted with painters, marble polishers, apprentice carpenters, and bricklayers.

^50. Khan et al. 2005, 56.

^51. See Gazdar 2004, 26. In the course of my research I did come across contractors hiring casual labor because of unforeseen circumstances (an established worker was incapacitated or the job in question required more labor than was immediately available). My observations here, however, are based only on the twenty-eight workers who, at various points in time, remained part of the “regular” team of workers employed by the subcontractors.

^52. Watanabe 1983, quoted in National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 52.

^53. There is also a certain social stigma associated with menial labor, which Pakhtuns seem less concerned with. Many local Punjabis are unwilling to undertake unskilled physical jobs, even when they are in a position of acute economic need.

^54. I found tremendous similarities between migrant labor in the housing construction industry and the working conditions and practices described in recent Indian scholarship. In particular, wages are lower in comparison to those of local workers, a personalized relationship exists between the contractor/supplier and workers, and credit is commonly used to keep workers dependent (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 115–16; Mosse et al. 2005.

^55. This is particularly acute in the case of Pakhtuns, who are subject to considerable abuse—most of it benign but some less so—from Punjabis. The hyperbole usually centers around a stereotype of the Pakhtun as lacking intelligence.

^56. When asked about what the contractor provided them, workers produced a long list that included protection from police, access to the Labour Department, which (selectively) allocates social security cards and the like, loans in emergencies, and facilities for washing and cleaning their personal belongings. In actual fact, the contractor denies workers their rights on a systematic basis. In the first instance, the contractor often rejects many of the finished implements, particularly in the case of surgical instruments. Since workers are paid on piece-meal rates, this translates into additional labor for the same wage. Second, in the case of accidents in which workers are injured while operating the looms or cutting an implement, which are actually quite common, the contractor takes care of their medical needs but then quite arbitrarily deducts a sum from their wage for the cost of the treatment. The contractor often does not pay the workers on time. In the event of any such abuse, the workers have no recourse, and it is a cruel irony that the contractor himself is supposed to be protecting workers rights.

^57. In Sialkot and Faisalabad, migrants hail from surrounding villages and therefore there is little distinction between “migrant” and “local” workers as is the case in housing/construction in Islamabad. This shared background also encourages greater solidarity among workers.

^58. I came across an important example of sustained political action during my research (and have been involved with this case ever since). Over the past couple of years, an organization called the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM) has mobilized power loom workers in Faisalabad city and surrounding urban settlements to challenge the existing contract system (including purported trade unionists) with reasonable success. It remains to be seen whether the LQM can provide workers with a decisive alternative to the patronage-based political and economic order. In its short period of existence the LQM has secured more rights for power looms workers than other “workers” organizations in the recent past.

^59. Importantly, class struggle is inherent in every exchange between workers and those above them in the production/patronage chain, but this struggle is often unconscious and therefore blunted.

^60. Subaltern Studies has illuminated the various forms of identity that constitute the consciousness of workers and peasants in South Asia, but the initial focus on a materially rooted social history of workers and peasants has recently given way to a tendency to separate “culture” from politics and economics. For a classic subalternist treatment of working-class culture within Subaltern Studies, see Chakrabarty 1983. In response, see Bahl 2000.

^61. Here I find resonance with the argument made by Gooptu (2007), who argues that jute workers in Kolkata have acceded to patronage norms as a survival strategy while largely forsaking class politics because of the changing structural context in which working-class politics and ideology have been “betrayed.”