When the workers of the world united under Karl Marx, they really had nothing to lose except their chains. But the striking government staff of today who have rallied under the self proclaimed torch bearers of the long dead socialist ideologue are a different lot, and a much pampered lot too.
As the State and the nation itself withers away under the relentless battering by this insatiable breed, who now have everything to gain by bringing one more weak-kneed government to its knees, it has indeed become imperative on our part to call their bluff. For, we the people of India who pay them for not working, now have nothing to lose but our sanity.
The fathers of our freedom took pride in adopting a socialist pattern of society and they attributed to the government the role of a model employer. But then, these fathers misjudged their children. Had they only known what type of legacy they were inadvertently but with good intentions, handing down to their future generations, they would also have defined how a model employee should be. But alas, the model employer is today bankrupt, and the employee is still not happy.
Having sucked the past, present and even future governments dry, these social parasites, who prey upon the nation’s efficiency and productivity with such alacrity that would put vultures to shame, are still negotiating for more. The unions claim that they are not going to relent until all their demands are met.
We remember hearing such voices only from the thickets of Tamilnadu where brigands and bandits conduct their business of kidnap and ransom. They now have peers in the concrete jungles too, in the form of union leaders, who in a frantic bid for survival in the face of an existential crisis, have sought to make cannon fodder out of the naive but willing employees.
It is not that the entire blame is being placed at the doorstep of the union leaders. But for the greed of the staff themselves, the leaders will make little mileage; it is just that these big cats have carried on with their game of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds for far too long, unbridled and unchecked, for want of volunteers to bell them. And what better time to do so when their atrocities, sorry success is at a peak!
Let our comrades touch their hearts, if they have one, and say whether their salaries are really as bad as they claim. A postal clerk or a sorter, who is now demanding a hike, already draws a minimum basic pay of Rs.4000 plus allowances that makes the gross pay packet to somewhere around Rs.5600. This is to begin with.
On an average this class draws about Rs.6600 to Rs.7000. Their qualification rarely exceeds the matriculate level. This is only a case in point, but the pay in other government departments is more or less similar, along with that most sought after concept called security. Obviously, the compensation packages of the government have no bearing whatsoever on the individual’s qualification or even merit, but then ours is a socialist government which is supposed to act as a great leveller.
It is indeed a sorry state of affairs that in the levelling process it is only the efficient heads that have been severed to add to the inert mass below, but that is a different matter. The moot point is, can anyone of these government employees who are now on strike, dream of even getting even half this pay if they were to quit their jobs and join the private sector, where there is a premium on efficiency?
How did the government staff become the islands of high pay and low efficiency when world over there is a shift towards market related, productivity linked wages? After all, their employments were not necessitated by any realistic assessment of the government’s workload.
Rather they are where they are, securely in saddle, because successive governments have thrust them on the unsuspecting people in a fit of socialistic euphoria, unmindful of their worth, not even bothering to define how a model employee should conduct himself. When the people of the nation have been so magnanimous to a fault, despite the unstoppable financial hemorrhage suffered by them, what moral right do these undeserving characters and their intractable leaders have to make the nation bleed?
Will they compensate for the financial and psychological turmoil that has been inflicted upon the taxpayer? Never! Rather they would shamelessly demand that the strike period be treated as working days and would want to be paid for those days too. We would be paying them even for screwing up our routines and throwing our daily life haywire.
Are the union leaders model employees, themselves? What sort of example do they set to their hordes who look up to them with reverence? Let alone carrying out their assigned work, these blue eyed boys have to be literally cajoled into performing the simple task of signing their attendance registers! The dictionary defines the word labour to mean toil, hard work. But these men follow a totally different lexicon which says work means plague!
When Winston Churchill was confronted by a labour stir in the government printing press, he said that everything is negotiable, except discipline. But for our unionists, discipline is almost always the first casualty, the most expendable commodity. Instances of union leaders publicly pulling up errant employees are virtually unheard of.
These middlemen, who invariably have the best of both worlds, who partake of the managements’ cake as well as share the worker’s porridge, are truly a blot on the labour firmament, if the lifestyles and modus operandi of most of them are any indication. There are of course honourable exceptions, but truly it is a tribe on the verge of extinction, if not already extinct.
When this newspaper carried an expose on the collections, running into several lakhs, made from the employees of an LIC union, for the benefit of a very ‘reputed’ leader, their reactions ranged from a display of hollow moralistic indignation to a lowly threat of counting our bones along with a suggestion of an escape route if we call a ceasefire.
Such mafia like demeanour of a majority of the unions and the militant postures of the leaders, whose relevance is under question, have already cost the nation heavy in the form of valuable mandays and disruption in economic activities, the magnitude of which can rarely be measured, not to speak of the turmoil the hapless taxpayer is put through. And when employees who are willing to work, are also bullied into joining the strike by the godfathers in the union, it is indeed an alarming state of affairs that may well spell doom for whatever work culture is still left in the nation.
The blackmail has gone on for too long. Unless these perpetrators of the labour terrorism are reined in and shown their true place, the country’s precipitous fall from the brink would be unstoppable. The central staff should see reason and proceed forthwith to break free from the clutches of their self seeking leaders, for they have nothing to lose, but a few pennies and, mercy, we have nothing more to give!
e-mail the writer at
[email protected]