The story of Pakistan’s trade union movement does not begin in Islamabad or Karachi, but in the railway workshops of colonial Lahore. It begins, unexpectedly, with an Irishman.

In the aftermath of the First World War, inflation soared and railway workers’ wages stagnated. Into this volatile atmosphere stepped JB Miller, Irish by origin, raised in India, and labelled a “troublemaker” in colonial records. In 1920, he helped lead a three-month railway strike demanding a radical principle: workers should choose their own leadership.

It was not merely a labour dispute. It was a declaration of dignity.

Dr Ahmed Azhar, historian of labour politics, explains that Miller’s union was never fully recognised by the colonial authorities. For nearly two decades, railway workers organised without official sanction, refusing to accept a compliant “babu union” propped up by the state. Recognition, when it finally came in 1942 amid wartime necessity, ironically marked the beginning of decline. Militancy, it seems, thrived on exclusion.

The movement evolved again in 1946 when Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim, later revered as Baba Masroor, brought the railway workers into closer alignment with the Communist Party. Arrested after Partition under the newly renamed Defence of Pakistan Act, Ibrahim spent years imprisoned, yet remained a towering figure in Mughalpura’s workshops. For him and others, trade unionism was not a stepping stone to revolution; it was itself the lived expression of working-class brotherhood.

Yet beneath the solidarity lay tensions.

Worker militants increasingly questioned the hierarchy within the Left itself. Intellectual leaders drafted party lines; manual labourers endured beatings and imprisonment. Some described this divide in terms hauntingly similar to caste, a language of exclusion that revealed unresolved inequalities within revolutionary politics.

By the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s populism energised labour politics, but also complicated it. Alliances were strategic, sometimes uneasy. Then came General Zia. Contrary to popular belief, repression did not extinguish the unions. According to veterans of the movement, the harshest crackdowns often produced the greatest solidarity.

What fractured the movement, Dr Azhar suggests, was something quieter: the internal disintegration of the Left after the Cold War. As ideological commitments softened and global currents shifted, the shared project of militant trade unionism lost coherence.

The railway workshops once symbolised collective defiance. Today, their echoes remind us that labour history is not simply about wages and strikes. It is about dignity, belonging, and the enduring struggle to bridge the gap between ideals and lived equality.

And as long as that gap remains, the spirit of the railway rebels endures.

© Naya Daur