Only half of what it takes…

By?N Sathiya Moorthy

In his May Day rally speech, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake urged trade unions not to press for pay-hikes. That he said so despite May Day celebrating the power of the labour world-wide, and? trade unions form the backbone of his ruling JVP-NPP combine should underscore the precariousness of the nation?s economy three years after the Aragalaya protests.

Yet, two days down the line on 3 May, trade unions in the country jointly urged the Government to raise the national minimum wage to at least LKR 50,000. Failure to do so would compel them to take united trade union action in the near future. Translated, if it came to that and their action became successful, the nation could well come to a standstill.

If so, the opprobrium of causing it all will fall on the centre-left Government of President Dissanayake.? In political terms, it could well nigh indicate the commencement of a tectonic shift of public support for this Government than the ruling combine?s relatively low score in the recently-conducted nation-wide local government elections would indicate.

The JVP-NPP alliance recorded a below-majority 43 per cent vote-share in the LG polls compared to the high 61 per cent in the parliamentary elections last year. The huge difference in the score also reflected in the number of seats that they won in Parliament and the number of local government bodies and seats that they could manage less than six months later.

Incidentally, the LG poll tally for the ruling combine is numerically the same as President Dissanayake?s victorious election figure, prior to the parliamentary poll. The shifting sands can be explained, or explained away, in many ways. But a prudent government party still waiting to face the much-delayed Provincial Council polls will be conservative in its assessment and careful in its dispositions before the people. Their days of chest-thumping are gone, full-stop.

Budgetary decision

It is in this context the trade unions opposition to a proposal to set the national minimum wage at? LKR 27,000 for the private sector, especially in the light of a budgetary decision to increase the minimum monthly basic salary in the public sector from LKR 24,250 to LKR 40,000 ? an LKR15,750 increase ? needs to be viewed. Their logic for demanding LKR 50,000 minimum wage is also based on facts and figures, so to say.

Citing data from the Department of Census and Statistics and the Central Bank, the unions have argued that a family of four requires over LKR100,000 per month to survive under ?the current economic conditions. So, the minimum wage should be set no lower than LKR 50,000.

Rather, the unions are demanding (?) only half of what it takes to survive. How and where from they hope to fill the gap, month after month after month, the unions have not explained. Maybe, they have further ideas or demands in the pipeline.

Worse still for the ruling combine, the unions are upset that the likes Wasantha Samarasinghe and Mahinda Jayasinghe, who were once with them are now a part of the Government and yet they are party to ?suppressing workers? issues?.? Of course, there are others like Minister K D Lalkantha, who is again a veteran trade union leader, now on the right / wrong side.

Massive demand

Yet, if one goes by more recent reports on the ?massive demand? for new vehicles, all of them imported, an economic fault-line seems to be re-emerging. Rather, it was always there, and the Aragalaya protests only pushed it to the background, as if it was going to be an era of milk and honey, for all Sri Lankans, rich, poor and those below the poverty-line.

Of course, when you talk about motor cars, and that too under a revived scheme that was on brakes after the dollar-crisis ahead of the Aragalaya protests, then you are visualising a scenario in which the nation?s rich and super-rich alone benefited. However, reports indicate that the booming numbers of middle-class people are also going in for new vehicles, whether their first ones or replacement of earlier ones.

This is so even when the prices of new vehicles are also increasing. And by middle-class you mean the salaried class, falling closer to the LKR 100,000 income families and not necessarily LKR 1,000,000 and above. Maybe, they are not strictly your one-hundred-thousand class or group, but they are closer to it in ways that most issues that impact the livelihood of those below that range would also affect them equally, if not more, at times.

Dichotomy returns

At a time when? salt, yes, is selling at LKR 400 and rice and coconut are also off limits for the poor and even the very same middle-class, what kind of world is the nation walking into? If the employee class demands higher salaries ? whether or not the government concedes it ? what about farmers and more so farm labour? And all those dependent on jobs in the unorganised sector for their family incomes and the future of their children?

This dichotomy was at the root of the ready acceptance of the SLFP-led centre-Left alliance in the fifties. This was even more the reason why the very same people joined the militant JVP movement when founded in the mid-sixties. They felt cheated by the traditional left, namely, the communist parties and their modern-day version in the SLFP.

The fact was that the SLFP alliance focussed overmuch on the ?Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist? part of their electoral agenda when in power and over-looked the socio-economic part. While the very same groups swore by the former, they did not forget the latter.

Yet, despite the ups and downs that the Left movement suffered, and despite the LTTE-led war, the nation was moving forward in socio-economic terms, as if it were on auto-pilot. That came unstuck not long after and the Aragalaya protests were the culmination of that reversal.

Does it mean that at the end of it all, the nation and the people are where they had begun at Independence, sans the ?nationalist? agenda that has seemingly outlived its politico-electoral utility for all concerned? The nation is at the cross-roads all over again, and which way it takes, or should take, all depends on the way the present government leadership leads them.

The hidden message is clear. But people who should be listening in should be doing so, taking time off from their political pre-occupations. That does not stop with the present-day rulers, however.

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)