Dream shoots

It is coming to being a year since Lehman Brothers collapsed,leaving the global economy with the spectre of the biggest depression this side of the 30s. But already,sightings of the green shoots of recovery are becoming rampant. Banks in the United States,for instance,are beginning to return to the government the enormous sums of bailout money they received in hastily-assembled emergency measures. In India,of course,no bank failed,an achievement we have embroidered with assorted explanations,ranging from the governments foresightedness decades ago in nationalising banks to far more plausible ones suggesting that banks operating in India pulled along through the crisis because they had not been exposed to new financial innovations like credit default swaps. Along the way,Indian banks performance in this year has oddly become a reason to be wary of financial sector reform. The logic being,if it aint so easily broke,why fix it.

Bless the United Forum of Bank Unions,then,for showing us why. UFBU claims to have pulled along 10 lakh employees in a two-day strike by public sector banks that began Thursday. They are demanding a wage hike and pension benefits,and during Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha got the full-throated endorsement of,among others,the CPIs Gurudas Dasgupta. He counselled government intervention,naturally on the side of the unions demands,saying that in these recessionary circumstances the costs of prolonged confrontation with bank employees could be huge. He failed,again naturally,to see that the very fact of the strike timed as so many union tactics are to win the employees a long weekend is a signal that things are potentially returning to business as usual.

This is of course good reason for bank managements to look into and be permitted by the rules to look into wages. And by the manner of their blackmail tactics and the collective bargaining they are able to enforce,the unions demonstrate exactly whats wrong. The argument is not against a wage hike,it is instead against the mandated-by-rules uniformity that informs the pay structure in public sector banks.