The Railway unions staged yet another strike on Wednesday – this time not due to any salary demands or such like but a disputed assault on one of the railway employees by another. This resulted in the trade unions in which the two employees were members going on strike until justice was meted out to their man since both employees claimed to have been the victim of the assault. The skirmish resulted in the cancellation of 78 train journeys while chaos reigned in the Fort and Maradana stations with a large number of stranded commuters threatening to turn violent. Some of them were seen brandishing their monthly season tickets to the TV cameras as if to indicate as to who was going to pay for their bus journey back home.
This, just about sums up the crisis that has beset the railways where employees can go on strike for the flimsiest of reasons or whenever it catches their fancy holding the travelling public to ransom.
It was only less than a month ago that the Locomotive Operating Engineers Union went on strike that stretched for over five days forcing President Ranil Wickremesinghe to issue a Gazette declaring the railways an Essential Service. That strike had caused the cancellation of 119 train journeys and the few that plied were so choked with passengers that saw travellers spilling out of the compartments, clinging on to the foot-boards or placed in precarious positions on the roofs and other parts of the train compartments. These high-risk journeys resulted in two deaths -one of them an Engineering student and the other a 41-year-old man.
Cabinet spokesman Transport Minister Dr Bandula Gunawardhana squarely placed the blame for the twin deaths on the 84 Locomotive operators who had struck work while the striking unions attributed fault on the Railway Department as a whole. The strike placed immense hardship on the commuters who in their thousands were seen languishing in railway stations hoping for the arrival of a train to take them to their workplaces, to hospitals and to attend to other emergencies while the Army was deployed at railway stations to prevent any untoward incident. Interviewed by television they all, in one voice, while heaping curses on the striking trade unions insisted on privatizing the Railways or taking other drastic steps to put a halt, once and for all, to these all too frequent rail strikes which have now become the norm.
Which now should make the authorities devise some drastic measures to put an end to this recurring problem affecting the railways. Wednesday’s strike, as already mentioned, had nothing to do with any official Trade Union demands but was only carried out as a demonstration of one-upmanship. In the end, the public was made to suffer in order to boost the egos of some Trade Union leaders. This indeed is unacceptable and a permanent solution should be found to end the frequent Railway strikes that not only inconvenience the public but also result in the loss of valuable man-hours on the labour front which the country can ill afford in the present context. One such move should be to act strictly in terms of the Essential Services Gazette and take the strongest possible action to bring to heel the striking union members. Thus far, the Essential Services decree invoked on various occasions failed to act as a sufficient deterrent chiefly due to the fact that the authorities failed to take action in accordance. The last occasion when the Petroleum unions staged a strike similarly, Essential Service was declared and in fact, nine trade union leaders were suspended from duties. However, the intervention of a powerful politician to whose party the union members belonged saw them receiving a reprieve and getting reinstated in their jobs. It is such action that has made trade unions, all along, disregard the Essential Services order and stick to their demands. The travelling public cannot be allowed to be penalized in this fashion. In fact, alternative options should be found to deal with all other strike actions in the different sectors when they crop up.
The tourism industry which suffered a death blow during the pandemic is now showing signs of great promise with arrivals reverting to the pre-Corona days. All it needs is de-stability and chaos to once again turn the clock back. Train journeys in this country are immensely popular with tourists to get them to the famous tourist spots and any disruption to the service is certainly going to be frowned upon and make the foreign traveller think twice before making the trip again. We say this because on one occasion during a sudden work stoppage in the railways, a group of stranded tourists at the Fort station were seen showing their pre-paid ticket reservations for a journey to the hill country to the television cameras with helpless gestures. On another occasion, during a lightning rail strike, television showed another group of tourists walking along a rail track dejectedly in some remote corner of the country after being forced to do so while the train stood stationary on the track. Needless to say, such scenes certainly are not the best advertisements to swell the number of tourists in the country. The authorities should consider all these factors in taking effective and drastic measures to end the crisis in the railways.
