Unmasking Our Unions:

 Like all other organized industries in India, we in shipping, inherit our own Unions. Dock Workers Union, Maritime Union of India, and their various affiliations are a few exemplary ones in additions to myriad local unions in the private ports, directly or indirectly controlled and mobilized by various political parties. The hard question to ask is – do they do any good to the little man?

 

Any Union is a tool by a select group of workers to collectively bargain for better wages & working conditions. It often does. That means the employer pays more than he ought to pay, had there been a perfect market where he could pick the most productive workers commanding the lowest wages and with a least demanding working conditions. This higher cost translates into a comparatively more expensive final product or service. Most importantly, the entire unemployed and poor population of India is denied access to this protected job-market and at the same time is asked to pay unjustifiably more for such products or services. In other words, the little poor man is made poorer by the acts of the Union, on every living day. We have people dying of hunger in Kandhamal without jobs. The above could be an old argument. However, today, for every Indian there is one Chinese, one Philippines, two Srilankans, or 0.2 Singaporean and many others in line to do the same job, directly or indirectly at the same wages but at a much accelerated pace of productivity. So, by stifling our little man, and allowing the Unions do dictate terms, we have moved these jobs out of India into these countries. Little wonder, we are a poor cousin to China in manufacturing and infrastructure building or Philippine seafarer or the worker who does our transshipment job in Colombo, Singapore or Portkelang or the Chinese or Korean shipyard who builds our ships. We do prominently well in IT, because we have no Unions so far. The only thing that the Unions have done and would do to our people and country is – make them poorer and uncompetitive in a flat world, where places like China or Singapore have no potent Unions. This anti-free activity of Unions in India will also shrink the job market in India and in an extreme case shall eliminate it, as they have already done in the past; making many million, Indians go hungry.

 

The Union was an old answer to an old problem in a far away-land with a different Socio-Political-Economic structure than ours.  In retrospect, this was no solution to the early European industrialization, as it haunts them even today, much to our benefit and shall continue to do same in the future, even insidiously encapsulated in the demonic Capitalism of the US. India is a story of nearly 10,000 years of experience & civilization. Until seventeenth century, India was the wealthiest nation in the world with a wealthy population. If we did not need Unions in the past, we do not need them now nor in the future, to keep us impoverished.

 

Therefore, we need a more modern approach that gives freedom of opportunity to our vast population of unskilled and makes migration from unskilled to semi-skilled or skilled and semi-skilled to skilled as easy & less painful as possible. This is where; we need to look at our Trade-Licensing and Training system etc with new lenses and rid the systems of the spirit of "License Raj" & seclusion of the little man from the mainstream economic activities. After all, a country's wealth or strength comes from its little men.