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Journalism of Courage
That the prime minister had to intervene and offer better salaries for oil PSU officers to call off their strike is not a solution but an indication of the problem. The threat of the strike should be a wake up call 8212; unlessthe oil sector is reformed, unless the super-dominance of PSUs, whose staff are unionised and practise industry-wide collective bargaining, is reduced, this most vital economic sector could always be held to ransom by a few people. Prime ministerial munificence can8217;t be an alternative to sectoral surgery. Bank officers and Airports Authority of India employees have been on strike in the recent past. They have shown the negative effects of continuing government presence in economic activities that require a modern, private sector ethos-driven dynamic. If closed airports or banks are bad, an oil sector shut down is a catastrophic scenario. So some serious thinking is required.
As long as government remains the majority, and for managerial purposes, the sole owner of oil PSUs, collective bargaining can always be a blunt instrument in the hand of unions. The ideal solution is of course that the oil sector becomes fully private thus making the issue of industry-wide collective bargaining irrelevant. But as an interim measure every oil PSU should be allowed to fix pay scales. Of course, allowing oil PSUs such freedom may not go down well with the petroleum ministry; remember the spats between oil PSU chiefs and petroleum ministers in the past on other related issues. But politicians with a problem are precisely the problem.
