It’s no longer news. The rigmorale has become too routine to rouse the anger or raise the hackles of a fatigued nation. If indeed, strikes by some group of public employees or the other, as the ones we witnessed this past week, are going to survive public contempt, official warnings and even court rulings and come about, come what may, then is it not high time for a formal ‘Strike Policy’? For starters, instead of sitting for hours on end in standing committees and blackmailing impotent regimes with insatiable wage demands, the Unions can first finalise some firm dates every year as Strike holidays a la festival or national holidays. That way, we the people, masters supposedly, but ever at the mercy of public ‘servants’, can also plan our itineraries as those blessed souls do.
Here’s how our lives got screwed up last week. Friday, fifteenth of August, being freedom day was a free day. Barring banks, which are open to public for half a day, Saturday is a holiday for the rest of the public sector and Governments. Sunday is universal, if you ignore some cursed fraternities like the ones to which this writer belongs. Monday, 18 Aug, SBI and its siblings went out of circulation and being the biggest banking family, also proved its bigness by bothering the most number of customers. Tuesday was a saving grace and a holiday for holidays. But at the dawn of Wednesday, the 20th, the strikers struck back. The rest of the banking community took the cue from the big brother, several other members of the public sector parivar followed suit and soon enough solidarity, if not a real-time strike, was flowing from other sympathisers too. If still, the country was not paralysed, it reflects either or both of two things: The public immunity to strikes is near total; and there is very little left to be paralysed! But whatever the impact on a numb nation, the strike, coming as it did in the very immediate aftermath of a Pay Commission bonanza, was an unkind cut and a pretty nasty way to say thanks!
Three players form the strike triangle: The political master minds, captains of labour and the staff who are the foot soldiers. Desperate politicians who have no work, even without strikes, form the elite corps. The brain wave for the latest strike originated in the fertile cyber cells of the comrades, as usual. These idle minds working overtime in devils workshops, namely, politburos, have been at their wit’s end ever since the N-deal-trust vote fiasco. It had taken these super-intellectuals and self-appointed sole custodians of public good over four and half years to discover that the UPA was anti-people. And presto, on the dawning of such wisdom, the sudden left turn in the direction of the hitherto forgotten masses was sought to be articulated in the only language they know: strike. Old wine, older bottle! Now, let’s grant that the UPA is anti-people. But is throwing the lives of the common man out of gear pro-people? An ordinary householder had to pay double for his auto ride to office, and was still hours late, thanks to the dharnas by the strikers at crowed places. Vegetables and fuel went scarce, whatever the price! And incidentally, the comrades were also claiming to be protesting inflation!
The next in the hierarchy are the Unions leaders, the movers and shakers, who don’t stir even if the country is on fire, on normal days. They head several outfits with high sounding acronyms that seem like an eye doctor’s reading board but the only sound you hear from them is the frequent call for strikes and strident threats of more strikes. They are their political masters’ voice and get to work only when multitudes scoot from work. Disruption is child’s play for them. The success of these pied pipers lies in leading as many PS staff out of office as possible. What a respectable vocation! Sure, there were many true, self-less champions of labour in both public and private sector till about the eighties but their collective halo has slipped since. Today, many Union leaders behave like pseudo-dons and intimidation is their chief weapon. Also in their arsenal is bluff, the biggest being their claim to the power of collective bargaining. No law recognises any Union, much less its leader, as the official rep for a group of PS employees, yet they prevail … and prosper. And unlike those they purport to serve, they never retire or tire!
The critical element in the trio is the employee. The key to the success of unionism is mobilisation and where best to reap huge human harvests than a Public Sector office? Also, bulk subscribtion/membership fee is guaranteed at one shot, offering a solid business model for any Union. But there is a very basic ‘anamoly’, to use a term that is, well, quite striking. Really, the labour movement derives its legitimate rationale only where there is exploitation or unhealthy working conditions. Can the impersonal Government, which is of, for and by the people said to be exploiting its employees? So, who are the well-entrenched staff and their unions fighting against? Morally and legally, a PS staff should not be allowed to form unions because, the State being a model employer, their jobs are secure and the pay assured on the appointed day. Grievances if any can only be on the quantum, and on that count, the entire nation is one huge aggrieved lot. All of us are running short.
But eventually, it is this constituency and their collective conscience that the rest of the nation too should appeal to if the scourge of strikes has to be eradicated. When a person strikes work he is actually unleashing a boomerang. After all, every government employee goes through all the travails that the others go through. A bank employee suffers when transport workers step on the brakes for a day, a striking EB lineman brings darkness to all including his own family and in these days of ATM-to-mouth existence, a non-banking day may mean suffering if not starvation, to multitudes, from secretariat staff to street corner hawkers. Strikes do not strike a chord of sympathy as the strikers believe but actually severs it. Indeed, deliverance day is the day on which a government employee, in his self-interest if not public interest, musters the conviction to defy the strike call of his leader and his leader. It is the latter two who should actually be put out of work!
Till then, those of us at the non-strikers’ end can do little else than ask for some small mercies. So, tell us comrades and captains, when the next strike is slated for! I am not interested in the reason because I know striking is an irrational, infectious itch. But I am asking so that I can read up on Marx at leisure. He started it all.
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