Thursday, February 21, 2013

THE TRADE UNION STRIKE IN INDIA


The trade Unions in India are affiliated to one political party or other, so, as a courtesy they do not protest against their own political parties’ policies. However it is not a hard and fast policy. This time all trade Union Leaders decided to strike work for two days on February 20 and 21 in unison. While striking work together for two days is unusual, the participation of I N T U C, ruling parties’ Trade Union in the strike is also strange especially when there are no crucial issues for the strike demanding immediate remedy.

   The strike call made by the Trade Unions is based on demands that cannot be solved in a discussion or within a time-frame by the Government nor by the Union Leaders themselves if they are in power. Their main demand, according to Kali Ghosh of C I T U, is to prevent price rise and corruption in Government. Both the demands are hazy and difficult to solve in a jiffy. It is also not a convincing reason for precipitating into a strike call since matters like price rise are economic phenomenon which can be tackled only gradually. As for the corruption there is a judicial system to take care of it in India and trade Unions can leave it at that like the rest of the population do.

The strike affected the states individually by different ways. The Kerala and Tripura were badly affected. There were no open shops, no buses, schools nor Hotels. Only Sun did rise and wind blew tepidly. Whereas in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai the strike call did not affect public life greatly. And all other States were affected by the strike in varying degrees in between the two extremes.

 The Banks did not work anywhere. The Bank Unions are left oriented and they will not sit still when the left Trade Unions call for a strike and other than that the Bank employees have no demands directly affecting their pay or service conditions.  (They are against financial reforms, so they have a number of demands to roll back many measures taken by the Government pertaining to Banking for which they strike work more often than not)  The non-functioning of Banks in a country for two days together is indeed a serious problem for both Government and public. The Trade Unions got a boost with the strike of Banks as the general public in no States were left unaffected by their strike-call.

In fact the whole thing turned out to be a war against General public by the Trade Unions for no apparent reason.  



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