Hot on the heels of a string of work stoppages by employees of several departments of the public sector which earned the wrath of the public, the unions of government teachers and principals announced a work-to-rule campaign for two weeks from yesterday. 

The prevalence of grievances among the teaching community and many more sectors is an undeniable fact. Teachers are currently demanding among others the two-thirds of the balance payment of an allowance due to them, for the past several years. Similarly, their inalienable right to fight for their rights and the legality of it are also undeniable. 

However, what ails the public sector is the apathy on the part of the high-ranking officialdom and the ordinary employees towards the violations of the rights of the general public by the trade union actions as well as their day-to-day activities. This rude attitude sometimes is evident by their drastic trade union actions disproportionate to the grievances. For instance, the locomotive engine drivers of the Railway Department launched a strike a few years ago inconveniencing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of commuters against a placement of one person at a particular position. 

The trade union leaders, if they value the support of the ordinary people in the country in winning their rights must realise that two strong factors decisively affect the relationship between their members and those people. They are their hostile or unfriendly attitude towards those who visit their offices for various needs and their apathy towards people when deciding the method and the duration of their trade union actions.

People always tend to find a middleman – a friend or a friend of a friend - with due connections within the relevant public office before they visited them, due to their prior knowledge and experience about the degree of support they would get at those offices. It is within this context the trade union actions are being launched depriving the strikers of public support, despite the validity and reasonability of their demands. And the heartlessness involved in some trade union actions such as the work strike by the non-academic staff members of the universities which lasted about two months, violating the rights of tens of thousands of students – current and past- is unacceptable by any standards. 

The ironic situation is that the more people are subjected to suffering and the more severe the suffering is inflicted during a trade union action, the more pressure is exerted upon the authorities to intervene and settle the issues in question. Hence, the success of a trade union action is measured by the number of people affected and the severity of suffering inflicted. 

Services such as health, education and transport are not privileges offered to the masses by the State or the trade unions, rather they are the rights of the people, universally recognised and accepted as much as the right of the workers to protest through strikes and demonstrations. Hence, the rights of the people and those of the workers are intertwined or overlapping. Unless the trade union leaders understand this the masses someday would inevitably react unpleasantly and unacceptably. It must be recalled that the train commuters cursed the trade union leaders during the recent sudden strike by the locomotive engine drivers. 

It is public knowledge that already people prefer private sector banks, hospitals and departmental stores etc. over those of the public sector, due to the efficiency, respect for customers and lesser corruption at the former places. The trend is gaining ground making more room for the leaders of the government who are working overtime to privatise the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Many commuters expressed views supportive of the privatisation of the Railway Department during the just concluded locomotive engine drivers’ strike.

It is high time the trade union movement weighs their rights and responsibilities before launching any action that violates others’ rights. No trade union leader should expect others to suffer or sacrifice for them to succeed in their strikes or work-to-rule.