Rulers and unionists from hell

Saturday 2nd July, 2022

What possessed the railway trade unions to launch a lightning strike yesterday causing hundreds of thousands of commuters to be stranded? Their leaders said they were protesting against the non-availability of fuel for their members to travel to work. Do they think fuel will be made available to railway workers simply because they resort to trade union action? What about other workers, especially those in the health sector, who are also experiencing the same problem? Doctors and other health workers languish in fuel queues, but hospitals remain open at least partially to treat the sick and save their lives. True, some railway workers cannot travel to and from work for want of fuel, but a serious effort must be made to operate as many trains as possible with the available workers. All other public and private institutions are managing with minimum staff. A strike is certainly not the way out. What would be the situation if the workers in other vital sectors such as power and energy, health, port, telecommunication, etc., emulated the striking railway unions?

Railway workers have legitimate grievances and so do all other workers, and they must be redressed. Fuel has to be made available on a priority basis to those who are engaged in the provision of essential services. Until the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation receives fresh oil shipments, arrangements could be made to provide fuel to those workers with the help of the Lanka Indian Oil Company. But the incumbent government is all at sea, and its leaders are running around like headless chickens; they are labouring under the delusion that their hare-brained token system will help sort out the fuel problem!

Strikes will only accelerate the country’s slide into anarchy, the signs of which are already visible. Hence the need for all trade unions to act responsibly and be different from failed political leaders. The Opposition also has a pivotal role to play in preventing anarchy from descending on the country; it has to go beyond making noises, and do something constructive.

The government has manifestly failed; it has not been able to make a dent in the crisis despite its leaders’ braggadocio and promises. The Opposition has also failed. It seems to be deriving some perverse pleasure from the people’s suffering and making the most of the situation. Its leaders are only walking and talking, so to speak, instead of coming forward to make a serious effort to form a multi-party interim government and implement their roadmaps, if any, for economic recovery. Protesting is the easiest thing to do during a crisis; a responsible Opposition needs to do much more for the sake of the people undergoing immense suffering.

The holier-than-thou Opposition politicians have declared that the government has failed––and rightly so––but, curiously, in the same breath they ask the failed regime to deliver! The need of the hour is a surgical procedure, as it were, in Parliament. What the Opposition grandees ought to do is to stop flogging a dead horse, close ranks, work out a common agenda with time-frames for the next general and presidential elections, and demand that the reins of government be handed over to a caretaker government consisting of all political parties represented in Parliament. Their coming together, however, will not help resolve the crisis overnight. But such a power-sharing arrangement will help bring about political stability, which is a prerequisite for economic recovery, and go a long way towards instilling hope in the hapless public, rekindling investors’ confidence, making progressive laws, formulating much-needed national policies, and, above all, convincing the rest of the world that Sri Lanka is serious about resolving its crisis and therefore deserves a helping hand. If all political parties could get together for the sake of the people and prepare a five-year plan, spelling out how the country will come out of the crisis, attain its development goals and repay its loans, that will make the task of having external debt restructured and obtaining foreign assistance easy.

Let it be repeated that trade unions must act with restraint. They have to be different from undergraduates who protest at the drop of a hat. Industrial action tends to snowball, and the unions that down tools at this juncture are likely to trigger a wave of strikes, which will deliver the coup de grace to the economy on oxygen support. That is something we need like a hole in the head.