Striking a blow...

BS OPINION

It is a measure of how far the Supreme Court has travelled in the last three decades, and especially in the last few years, that it has held that government servants "have no fundamental, statutory, equitable or moral right" to strike work.

Though most people will have been taken aback by the decision, because of the common assumption that strikes are an accepted form of employee protest, the operating principle is a sound one: service of the sovereign is a privilege, not a right ("you serve at the pleasure of the President").

This principle is not questioned anywhere except in India. In case after case since 1988, the court has sought to restore the balance between the rights and the responsibilities of government employees.

This is very different from the court of yesteryear when judicial activism, as it was called, tended to work in the opposite direction, including declaring that hospitals, clubs and educational institutions were covered by the Industrial Disputes Act and further that the public sector companies were the same as the 'State"'when it came to defining the conditions of employment, and compensation in the event of retrenchment.

For good measure, even contract workers were deemed to be full-time employees in public sector companies. All this had severely curtailed the government's ability to take disciplinary action, and hobbled many companies (like Air-India) while expanding the rights of government and public sector employees beyond the limits envisaged by the Constitution.

When the Court was in that mode, the trade unions and the Left hailed it as a messiah. Today, they call it retrograde. But howl as they will, the truth is that the court has interpreted the law correctly. Government servants do not, indeed, have a legal or fundamental right to strike.

They can form associations, of course, for that is a guaranteed right under the Constitution. But strike work? No, and for good reason too.

As the court has pointed out, they have other avenues for seeking redress and, in any case, they cause too much disruption. In other words, it is not just an employer-employee issue, there is also the citizen who is affected, and he counts.

It is interesting that government servants did not go on strike until the late 1960s, when political fragmentation and the resulting impulse for competitive populism made governments vulnerable and inclined to be soft on strikers, and where the courts even went soft on such atrocities as the 'gherao'.

The Court has also struck the right chord when it talks of moral rights. The truth today is that the man in the street sees government employees as oppressors in one way or another "" which is a comment on their dealings with the citizen.

On top of this, the ability to strike work without the danger of punitive action has made the people doubly vulnerable to government employees, already under the protection of Article 311.

So now if the unions and the Left (and perhaps some political parties) raise dust on the issue, they will find that the people are not with them. Quite simply, the mood has changed and the Supreme Court has captured it.