Oswald B. Firth, OMI
Director of Centre for Society and Religion

It is a matter to be regretted that May Day in our times has come to reflect the emasculation of the working class by political party panjandrums. It has served as an ambiguous indicator of their relative strengths matched against the lengths and loudness of their May Day rallies. It is not too distant from the truth to say that many of our workers have been transmogrified into being pawns or pliant tools of self-seeking political party leaders.

Memories, it is said, are often short lived. The sorry spectacle of protracted strikes, whether they be in the postal or health sectors, is a sad and somber reminder that the halcyon days when the present Sri Lankan government stormed into the halls of political power, riding on the shoulders of trade unions, is fast becoming a forgotten episode in the annals of recent history. Prejudices and prevarications have dominated the scene in the past few months where the government and the trade unions have been locking horns and hurling puerile invectives at each other while the rest of the country looked on in utter despair.

Such fiascos are among the least of the worries of the country’s elite. Private hospitals will cater to their physical needs, and e-mails and faxes will keep their businesses buzzing, come what may. In the meantime, the man-in-the-street is bamboozled into believing that his letters are on the verge of being delivered, and that since the nurses are back to work in their new shoes and uniforms, everything is calm and quiet on the medical front!

We do not hold a brief for the country’s unions, nor do we condone their leaders for each and every political action overtly or covertly intended to embarrass the present government. Nevertheless, we cannot but resolutely affirm the trade unions’ right to motivate and mobilize the workers to stand in defense of their basic rights. Equally, we hasten to condemn them when we realise that they have become destructive juggernauts that bow and bend to the whims and wishes of politicians who consider the trade unions to be their personal property. Governments, on the other hand, on whom the people have lavished sovereign power through their sacred ballot, have a mandate conferred on them to rid this land of endemic injustice, agonising poverty and other ills that gnaw at the social fabric. As a government, their area of influence must spread as far as cultivating mutually profitable harmonious relationships where recognised trade unions are concerned.

The Supreme Value of Labour

No one expects a government that claims to be democratic to throw members of trade unions onto the streets simply because they have resorted to syndicalist action. Such drastic and inhuman action did lead certain families to virtual death and disaster in the 1980s. Only morons would want to keep repeating such mistakes. But we cannot absolve the government from its failure to exercise good governance in resolving prolonged trade union actions which soon degenerate into tension-ridden stalemates, the brunt of which has to be borne by the poor. Dreadful indeed would be the day when a government looses its credibility and political leverage to resolve a crisis through dialogue because it was found to be wanting in moral and ethical integrity in the eyes of the workers.

The country’s labour force, which is over half of its population, is a treasure that cannot be matched by the country’s entire natural capital put together. One of the Catholic Church’s papal documents on the subject, Laborem Exercens, says that we must emphasise and give prominence to the primacy of man in the production process, the primacy of man over things. Everything contained in the concept of capital in the strict sense is only a collection of things. Man, as the subject of work and independent of the work he does - man alone - is a person. This truth has important and decisive consequences (LE, 12:1-6), which refer to the rights and responsibilities that establish clearly the dignity of the worker in relation to his work. This relationship should never be severed since labour is the creator of capital and the engine of progress.

Marx had clearly understood the nature of human labour. He firmly believed that labour generates capital and that labour created economic value. Whether it is pins or concrete pinnacles, or rockets and skyscrapers, or the simplest piece of furniture and the most sophisticated computer, or artisanal crafts and the output of inspirational writers, the prodigious transformative force of human labour has always been at work. One of the greatest pedagogical educationalists of our times, Paulo Freire, has this to say of the distinctive contribution of human labour over the rest of creatures: "Behaviourism fails to comprehend the dialectic of men-world relationships. Under the form called mechanistic behaviourism, men are negated because they are seen as machines.

"The second form, logical behaviourism, also negates men, since it affirms that men’s consciousness is ‘merely an abstraction.’ The process of ‘conscientisation’ cannot be founded upon any of these defective explanations of man-world relationships... Because they are able to have goals, men alone are capable of envisaging the result of their action even before initiating the proposed action. They are beings who project, as Marx makes clear in his Capital: ‘We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’." (Cultural Action for Freedom) Herein lies the true culture of labour.

Worker Alienated from His/Her Work

We are all victims of a market driven economic system that is fast moving in the direction of ruthless capitalism. This has led to alienating men and women from their own labour. "Alienation of labour" denotes the fact that the capitalist system reduces free, self-creative subjects to objects, to mere economic commodities that can be used and abused with impunity. In a capitalist society, the means of production are privately owned and dedicated to the pursuit of profit. Under such circumstances, the worker is at a considerable disadvantage because he/she is always driven by the specter of starvation to seek a new labour contract. The capitalist, on the contrary, has the choice of hiring a different worker, redeploying his capital, or hiring no one at all and simply living on his capital (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). Marx was perhaps unaware that today, portfolio capital, better known as market speculation, can disrupt whole countries and throw hundreds of thousands of workers onto the streets with a single stroke of capital transfer. How more powerless and helpless can the worker become! As Marx puts it, "It is the ability of the capitalist to put his capital to other uses which subjects the worker, who is limited to one employment of labour - since he has only one marketable skill - to starvation..." (Wages of Labour)

The worker, reduced from a living human being to an economic object or commodity, is little more than an appendage of the machinery owned by the capitalist. He doesn’t use his intelligence or capacity for judgement in his work, nor is he involved in the decisions and responsibilities concerning the work he does. He is required simply to do as he is told. His lack of control over his productive activities indicates the level of his dehumanisation. Another radical strategy is needed to replace capitalist production relations with ones that would place in the hands of humans total control over their production activities. That day, of course, is still to come.

A Stranger in Foreign Lands

Today, the alienation of workers from their labour extends as far as the Middle East where over 80,000 of our women are engaged in menial jobs just to keep the kitchen fires burning back at home, or perhaps to construct a little shelter for themselves and their siblings. While the resources earned by these workers figure among one of the highest sources of income in the country’s national accounts, the treatment meted out to them at our embassies abroad and on arrival at our airports must surely put us to shame.

As we reported in the March 1998 issue of Social Justice (the monthly journal published by the Centre for Society and Religion): "There are over 500,000 migrant workers mainly in the Middle East who contributed Rs 35 billion (US0 million) to the national coffers in 1994. Over 50 percent of them are women working in the category of maids. In 1995, 11 deaths of Sri Lankan women were reported from the Middle East. Reports of physical and verbal abuse on women at Sri Lankan embassies and local NGOs (non-governmental organisations) were as high as 400 a month." Stories of women who are in prison, others who have disappeared, shocking stories of multiple rape, shattered families and traumatised women should make us wonder whether those who fuel the economic machine of this country are being treated with a sense of moral decency and humanity. Besides, women’s unpaid contribution to domestic labour, though often romanticised in our musical and literary outpourings, draws a total blank in our current accounting systems that have the least concern for human labour. The other blot on our society is the unconscionable use of children to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for a mere pittance that could hardly keep their fragile body and soul together.

The Workers’ Charter

We sincerely hope that at least some of the above deficiencies would be addressed by the long-delayed Workers’ Charter which awaits ratification in its original form by the government so that it can have the needed legal weightage to become an effective instrument of justice for all parties concerned. There are, of course, some within the People’s Alliance (PA) government who maintain the ill-considered view that the Workers’ Charter should remain where it is, in political limbo, at a time when the country’s economy is on the upbeat. They feel that it will become a threatening tool in the hands of disgruntled union leaders. There are still others who rightly maintain the view that the Charter favours more the employer than the employee.

Another pronounced view is that the Charter falls far short of the internationally recognised rights of workers. For instance, Article 8 (d) of the International Covenant on Economics, Social and Cultural Rights, adapted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 16 December 1966, and ratified by the Sri Lankan government on 27 May 1980, specifically recognises the workers right to strike provided it is exercised in conformity with the law of the country. Similarly, Article 6 (4) of the European Social Charter of 1961, recognises the right of workers to take collective action to strike, subject to obligations that arise from collective agreements previously entered into. Most surprisingly, the Charter does not recognise an overall right of the workers to collective action and to strike. It only guarantees to workers the right to join trade unions and to "organise and bargain collectively" (Part I, a, of the Charter).

Part 3 of the Charter is titled "Wage, Terms and Conditions of Employment," and deals also with highly vulnerable categories of workers. These include workers employed by contractors, apprentices, trainees, casual employees and those subject to probation. At present, these categories of employment are largely unregulated and require some degree of safeguards to prevent their exploitation.

Despite the Charter’s manifest intention to strengthen the employer-employee relationships and to promote industrial peace and harmony, it remains to be seen to what extent the Charter will ensure the social and political security and other rights of workers, and not remain a mere document which mostly spells out the duties and responsibilities of workers.

A Momentous Season

The month of May encapsulates another sacred event, which can create an atmosphere where "peopley" will take predominance over "potentatesy" of whatever kind. This event, which should penetrate and permeate all our thinking and action processes, is none other than the Enlightenment of Lord Buddha, whose purifying influence pervades the length and breadth of our land. The path that leads to selflessness and concern for the other is the Arya-astangika Margaya (The Blessed Eight-fold Path). In his discourse, the Buddha invites his disciples to reflect on the path that leads to liberation. A few lessons from this profound and thought-provoking discourse, such as Samma Ditti (right vision), Samma Sankappa (right thoughts and concepts), Samma Vacha (truthful words), Samma Kammantha (right action) and Samma Ajiva (impeccable livelihood), would have helped both government and the trade unions resolve the present impasse ages ago.

If governments could settle workers’ conflicts with the same speed with which they sell off the Steel Corporation, Air Lanka, the phosphate mines, Sri Lanka Telecom and many other resources, perhaps there would not have been any need to scuttle those workers who see that the government is not always working in their best interest.