Strike

When bus drivers go on strike you pay a little more money and take a rickshaw, when rickshaw –wallahs strike you pay a little more money and take a taxi but when motormen strike you( and a whole lot of other people ) are right royally screwed.

Over 800 motormen of the western and central railway went on strike for most of Monday and Tuesday and as expected their Bhook -hadtal did indeed cripple the city. Anyone who was affected by the strike seemed to be cursing ‘those bloody motormen’ who had caused all the havoc. Right from Raj Thackeray who characteristically said “The motormen should withdraw the strike till afternoon else my party would oppose the strike in their style” all the way till my posh friend who quipped – “I don’t give a damn about them, get the trains back”. It seemed that people didn’t really care about what the strike was all about in the first place. Ok maybe Raj Thackeray knew all about it but I’m quite sure that most commuters didn’t know exactly what was going on.

I know that the strike did indeed cause a lot of problems (It was front page news). I was myself stuck near Churchgate with no way to return until I caught a bus so crowded that I was literally suspended in mid-air by the people around me. And the weather was not really nice as well; there was enough sweat around me to gel someone’s hair. So evidently I too was quite angry with the striking motormen, but I decided to see what the whole thing was about anyway. And after browsing through many news websites I finally found an article which had a little paragraph which depicted the issue from the motormen’s point of view. Well it turns out that like most government employee strikes this one too was about wages. Like most other government workers motormen too were being paid too little. Even as the real-estate bubble broke and the world was in recession the heads of many investment banks continued to beef up rather than cut their salaries. No one said a word that time. These motormen on the other hand always do their work perfectly well and when they ask for a raise so that they can cope with rising prices many condemn the act. . Also their cause was not completely related to wages. I heard an interview with one of the striking motormen on the radio and in the interview he insisted that the strike was partly due to poor facilities for both workers and commuters. The motormen were worried about the safety of the local trains as well. Luckily enough RR Patil intervened and the strike was stopped but the opposition is always there to blame someone and this time it was Mamta Banerjee (who was in Kolkata making last moment preparations for municipal elections (where she has incidentally gotten into a row with the Congress)). And so the matter ended with the focus drifting away from workers issues to parliamentary politics the moment they called of the strike

As a kid most people love strikes and bandhs, the reason – you get a holiday. But as always growing up sucks and now when we think of strikes we curse our luck rather than celebrate. Not getting a train may create problems for us, but the hindrance lasts for a day or two. But in the case of the motormen, a low wage means problems all the time and so I think that their strike is indeed justified.