JUST SPAMMING | A Farce Of A Bank Strike That Will Help None

A standard advisory from the State Bank of India (SBI) to its customers said the bank’s branches would be open on Sunday, September 27, to provide banking services to them. It should have warmed the cockles of many customers since transacting business in regular bank branches on a Sunday would be a boon to many. People will be happy to visit a bank, for whatever reason, on a holiday when they will have no work otherwise because to find the time to visit the bank on a normal working day is not that easy. But then, the decision to keep the bank open on a Sunday was not taken to help the customers transact business leisurely without taking leave from their workplace but because the banks will strike work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

So, the three-day closure has been thrust on the unwary customers of many nationalized and other banks because the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of seven trade unions in the banking sector, has called for the strike that would give the workers and officers a long five-day holiday or rather and extended weekend. The main demand of the UFBU is a five-day week, which means the public sector banks will not function on Saturdays. The demand is not something that has risen out of any sense of public good but would only put the customers in difficulty during the weekend. But since the banks did not want the people to feel the pain of a long holiday for them, they have decided to work on Sunday and make it a three-day closure.

When asked why should the common people not grumble over a strike to truncate the working week, which will ultimately make the people suffer, the answer is that only the physical banking operations will be affected and modern day transactions like digital banking, net banking, customer apps, Automatic Transfer Service (ATS) operations, and ATMs will function. To put it otherwise, a tech-savvy bank customer will not be affected at all. In fact such customers would have stopped visiting a bank branch long ago. It is the common people who are basically not adept in fiddling with technologically advanced devices and normally bear the brunt of the outbursts and inefficiencies of the banking staff whenever they visit a bank branch who will be affected.

There is another argument that not many people nowadays visit a bank branch for transactions since they could do everything they want with a smartphone. In that case the question is ‘what purpose will the strike serve?’ If banking operations are not to be affected to inconvenience the common people by a three-day strike what will bring the allegedly recalcitrant management (or is it the government, in this case?) around and impel them to listen to the woes of the bank workers? The bigger question is why should the unions agree to work on a Sunday if they really want to make an impact by provoking the customers to take up the cudgels on their behalf with the government? Well, it is true that people might not care a hoot if the banks are closed for five days in a row because physical banking has lost its relevance long ago.

More than that, a strike by UFBU, despite its claim that it represented ‘over 90 % of the workforce across public sector, private, foreign, regional rural and cooperative banks,’ is unlikely to force the present government into looking into their grievances. In fact the trade union movement, not just in the banking but in all organized sectors, has lost its teeth long ago, all over the country, for various reasons. Nowadays it is young political and not fully political activists who impel the government to make people-friendly decisions. Take the example of the Cockroach Janata Party that earlier forced the removal of Dharmendra Pradhan from the post of Union Education Minister and is now part of the agitation demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Since Civil Society groups and youth wings of political parties – the Youth Congress spearheaded the agitation in New Delhi demanding the ECC’s resignation - have started using protests as a means of rectifying the flaws in society and the political system, the trade unions have become redundant in the overall political scheme. Ever since India embraced liberalization, privatization and globalization to pep up its economy, the trade unions have been left behind. Most trade unions have turned into puppets of their management or government and are not keen on backing unions, even to use them for their political needs, anymore. So subtle changes have been brought into laws governing the right to collective bargaining and people no longer talk about labour rights with the employers usurping many such rights and the public concerned only about its welfare.

So the banking strike demanding, among other things, a five day work week is unlikely to get the support of the public. One of the reasons for it is the failure of the trade union activists to mobilize or give a voice to many groups of unorganized toilers like the gig workers and get them the due labour rights. Perhaps if organized sector unions expand their wings to take in unorganized sector workers to make common cause of their rights, the traditional right to protest could be regained in full.