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print versionLe Monde diplomatique - Dec. 2022
Pakistan’s textile industry is a major supplier for Western discount clothing brands. This means nothing is allowed to disrupt productivity; workers’ rights and safety are frequently flouted, and police and private security firms use intimidation and violence to ensure the machines keep running.
by Laurent Gayer & Fawad Hasan
Green Park City is a recently built gated community that adjoins Landhi Industrial Area, southeast of Karachi, Pakistan’s economic and financial capital. The development, a rare island of greenery in this densely populated industrial zone, consists of smart apartment blocks with gleaming SUVs outside and well-tended landscaping. It’s home to the families of those who have been successful in local industry, the recruiters who supply the labour, and working-class managers who have risen through the ranks. The district’s infrastructure may not match its ambitions — the electricity supply is as erratic as in adjacent working-class areas — but its conspicuous affluence is testament to the possibility of social ascent in the textiles and clothing industry, Pakistan’s pre-eminent economic sector.
Bilal Khan is one such upwardly mobile worker. We met at his huge but modestly furnished flat in May this year. Originally from the northwestern Dir region, he grew up in Karachi and graduated from high school there. He began working at 15, doing menial jobs in a textile factory; by 43 he was a production manager for one of the country’s largest clothing manufacturers.
His success is partly due to hard work, but would have been impossible without relationships with political parties, whose support is critical to running the factory. For three decades, from 1985 to around 2015 (see Karachi: a city at war with itself, in this issue), Karachi was under the sway of these parties, which have become militarised and control access to essential services such as water, electricity and transport. The parties’ coercive activities make their support essential to doing business as their members maintain discipline in the factories.
Khan described how this export-oriented industry weathered the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused border closures and a drop in domestic sales, by tapping into the new global market for personal protective equipment (PPE) that opened (...)
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