Four railway unions have launched a 48-hour strike demanding the removal of the General Manager of Railways. The Government has refused, many trains have continued running, but ticket counters have been disrupted and the Railway says it could be losing around Rs 5 million a day. Once again, an industrial dispute inside a state institution is being paid for by the travelling public.
A 48-hour railway strike has brought another long-running dispute inside Sri Lanka Railways into the open, with several unions demanding the removal of General Manager Ravindra Pathmapriya while the Government insists that a senior public official cannot simply be dismissed because unions demand it. The industrial action involves station masters, assistant drivers and railway yard workers and follows complaints over the administration and operation of a railway system already struggling with delays, cancellations, ageing equipment and serious locomotive availability problems.
The unions say their grievances have accumulated over a considerable period and include concerns about administration, operational failures, passenger facilities and disciplinary issues involving railway employees. Their central position is that confidence in the General Manager has broken down and that changing the person at the top has become necessary if the Department is to function properly.
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The Government has taken a different position. Deputy Transport Minister Dr Prasanna Gunasena has argued that a General Manager cannot simply be removed on the demand of a trade union and that allegations concerning his administration must be dealt with through the appropriate process. That principle matters because while trade unions unquestionably have the right to expose failures and resort to lawful industrial action, a strike cannot itself become the disciplinary procedure through which a public official is removed.
What makes this strike particularly interesting is that the railway has not stopped altogether. Office and school trains continued operating on Thursday and attempts were made to maintain long-distance and other services, although several trains, including night-mail services, were cancelled as the industrial action began. The disruption instead extended to ticket counters, producing the extraordinary spectacle of trains continuing to carry passengers while revenue collection was affected.
The General Manager has estimated that the disruption to ticket sales could cost Sri Lanka Railways nearly Rs 5 million a day. That may appear insignificant beside the billions routinely discussed in government expenditure, but this is a railway system that can scarcely afford to lose another rupee unnecessarily.
A Railway Department report disclosed this week that only 50 of its 98 locomotives were operational. That means almost half the locomotive fleet was unavailable even before the strike began, which raises a question considerably larger than the personalities involved in the present dispute: what exactly has happened to one of the country’s most important public transport systems?
For hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans, the railway is not an optional service. It is how they get to work, how children reach school, how government employees reach their offices and how families living considerable distances from Colombo avoid the much greater cost of travelling by road. When the railway fails, the economic cost therefore extends far beyond the revenue lost at a ticket counter.
The unions are entitled to argue that poor administration ultimately damages passengers and that industrial action may sometimes be the only means available to force attention upon longstanding problems. But that argument carries a corresponding responsibility to demonstrate clearly what those failures are, while management and the Transport Ministry have an equal responsibility to answer them rather than allowing another dispute to drift towards confrontation.
There is also a larger issue about the way Sri Lanka handles industrial relations in essential public services. Too often negotiations continue until the threat of a strike becomes real, positions harden and the public suddenly discovers that it has become an unwilling participant in a dispute about which it knew remarkably little the previous day.
Sri Lanka Railways belongs neither to its General Manager nor its trade unions. It belongs to the public, which finances it and depends upon it. Whatever grievances exist inside the Department must therefore be resolved without forgetting the people standing on railway platforms wondering whether the next train will arrive.
The first day of this strike has already demonstrated something rather revealing: even with industrial action underway, much of the railway can apparently continue moving. The real test is whether management, unions and the Government can make it work properly when everybody returns to work.
Be that as it may.
