Toughness and tact

The nation has heaved a sigh of relief over the postal employees calling off their indefinite strike. The week-long strike had caused imm...

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The nation has heaved a sigh of relief over the postal employees calling off their indefinite strike. The week-long strike had caused immense hardship to the people, a majority of whom do not have access to more sophisticated means of communication than that provided by the Postal Department. What is noteworthy about the resolution of the dispute is the “mutual trust and understanding” the two sides showed in their final negotiations. That there is no written agreement between the unions and the government is, in fact, a measure of this very spirit of trust. It was particularly generous of Communications Minister Sushma Swaraj not to have taken resort to ESMA and other confrontationist measures when she would have been within her rights to do so. It is now the turn of the employees to clear the huge backlog of work created by their action, in as short a period as possible. Needless to say, the right posture adopted by the Communications Ministry throughout the strike period went a long way in facilitatingthe early withdrawal of the strike. While being considerate, it refused to yield to the pressure tactics of the strikers. This quiet but no-nonsense attitude had a salutary effect on the employees who sensed that they could not browbeat the government.

Strike is never a good way to seek redressal of grievances particularly when a mechanism for negotiation and mutual communication exists. That the postal employees have some genuine demands and are deserving of popular sympathy would have been reason enough for them to show more patience than they did. At the same time, the ministry has to do some serious stocktaking as to how the situation was allowed to come to such a pass. While it is evident that some politically motivated union leaders, as is their wont, were fishing in troubled waters, a department such as this cannot afford not to have its fingers on the pulse of its employees at all times.

Politically, the strike assumed importance as it was the first trial of strength between the government and theorganised sector since the BJP came to power. It is possible that the postal employees had presumed that being a coalition of variegated parties, the government’s arm could easily be twisted. Perchance, if the government had failed this test, it would have emboldened other sections of government and public sector employees to resort to strikes at the slightest provocation. The manner in which the government employees’ unions could browbeat the United Front government and have all their demands accepted is of too recent a vintage to be forgotten. The nation is yet to recover from that shock when the UF leaders virtually handed the key of the exchequer to their employees’ unions. Another capitulation now would have firmly established a disastrous trend. It is now hoped that the workers and the ministry exploit this new found goodwill to modernise one of the most efficient yet old-fashioned of the public utilities still groaning under the weight of too much work, poor revenues, poorer infrastructure andcompetition in the form of courier companies. It is not a day too late to embark on a programme of radical transformation and modernisation.