Workers of India unite!

I've always appreciated editorials in the Indian Express. They seem to me very straightforward and to the point. They usually get to the main point without beating around the bush, in a very curt language. And in this particular editorial, I love the words used to describe them. But they do talk of a very important point. Most of these country's policies are held hostage by a vocal few while most prefer to keep quiet even if they approve of them. This needs to change.

With the AAI strikes going on in Delhi, led by the Left, the IAF has been put on standby and there are reports that the employees will be slapped with ESMA (Essential Services maintenance Act) if they try to disrupt the airports.

Workers of India unite!

Will airports become dysfunctional? We hope they do. We hope AAI unions muster the efficiency to paralyse air services now that Delhi and Mumbai airports have been awarded to private parties. We want the strike to be lengthy. It shouldn’t merely be the case that air passengers suffer huge inconveniences. Air travel as an option should become virtually unavailable. We say that because a protracted strike will establish a fundamental point: that even if privatisation means zero job losses, airport employees have a right to not accept a change in their work environment; even if we have to make do with third grade airports we don’t have a right to ask for better choices. This precept in fact should be extended across the board, for all state-run services.

When that is done, those of us ambivalent about reforms in the state’s economic activity and those of us who tend to think that arguments for change mask heartlessness towards workers’ welfare, will have a marvelous opportunity to rethink. What is the price of allowing comfortably compensated, tenure-protected, work-wary state employees to define what should or should not be done? How is a policy that sacrifices the future of many to coddle the vested interests of a few egalitarian? Are we free market loonies simply because we want better services for which we are ready to pay?

For long, these questions have not been discussed openly and dramatically in India. Arguably, they never have been because reforms in this country have never really been sold in the name of consumers.

Britain of the 1970s showed what such muted public debates could lead to. Union militancy was never confronted, only accommodated in various degrees. The Thatcherite revolution was born out of the resultant public anger. India’s political and social complexity means there will be no Maggie Thatcher. But we do need to understand once and for all the social and economic costs of being blackmailed by a militant labour aristocracy.