The holiday makers

After the employees of the public sector banks struck work on Tuesday, it was the turn of the workers of public sector insurance companies to follow suit. They were more adroit in their timing, cleverly appending a two-day strike to the long Holi weekend and getting themselves a five-day break in the middle of the busy season. But it is precisely such opportunism that can damage their interests in the long term, as competition raises its head and market shares slip away. Strikes of this kind could see consumers shift their loyalties to private players.

One of the demands that both the bank and insurance workers have raised is that of higher wages. Evidence suggests that PSU bank and insurance employees at the class three and four levels are satisfactorily paid. The average worker in a PSU bank earned Rs 2.8 lakh in ’03-’04, as compared to Rs 2.9 lakh in private banks. So there is really not much of a gap in the average wage. The productivity of a bank employee is gauged in terms of “business conducted per employee”. On an average, a PSU bank staffer did Rs 2.4 crore of business while his counterpart in a private bank did 75 per cent better, registering Rs 4.2 crore of business. There is, therefore, no case to pay PSU bank employees more. The business conducted by the flagship PSU bank, the SBI, is nine times bigger than that of the flagship private bank, HDFC Bank. But SBI is shockingly bloated, with 36 times more staff.

In the old days, when 90 per cent of banking was done by PSU banks, strikes were a dreadful inconvenience. Things are different today, with the market share of PSU banks in ‘loans and advances’ having dropped to 73 per cent. In addition, the most valuable customers — the kind that are likely to buy many services and hold big balances in savings accounts — are moving away. They are the ones who value the superior service offerings of private banks, and get annoyed by frequent strikes. The message then for those who habitually down their shutters is clear, whether in the banking or insurance sectors: shape up, or the shutters may just come down permanently.