Education policy and FUTA’s mandate: some thoughts
August 19, 2012, 7:39 pm
, The Island
By Prof. Jayadeva Uyangoda
Member AFTA, University of Colombo
Some
people have made an argument that FUTA has exceeded the mandate of a
trade union when it demands the government to allocate 6% of the GDP to
education. This argument emanates from the position that trade unions
have no business with government’s fiscal policy. According to the
advocates of this position, deciding priorities and policies of
allocating government expenditure is entirely the job of the government
and its policy-making officials.
This essay is only supplementary to the excellent response earlier circulated by Shamala Kumar of Peradeniya.
To
begin with, the argument of FUTA exceeding its mandate emanates from a
narrow, minimalist, and sorry to say, outdated, understanding of trade
unionism. Although trade unions have often focused their struggles on
wage demands, trade unionism in general has not been confined to
wage-related demands alone. Those who have the slightest understanding
of the history of trade unionism in Sri Lanka would know that even
during the colonial times, Sri Lanka’s trade unions combined economic
demands with social and political demands as well. It is wrong to
suggest that trade unionism by definition is concerned exclusively and
only on wage demands.
What the critics of FUTA’s demand for
increased allocation of government expenditure on public education want
from FUTA is to confine its concerns to a narrow and minimalist
framework. But, neither the FUTA nor many of the trade unions in Sri
Lanka or elsewhere are minimalist in their orientation, agendas and
demands.
This wage-related minimalism in trade union agenda
is a position advocated at present in Sri Lanka by two groups of FUTA
critics. The first group represents the interests and policies of the
government and the Ministry of Higher Education. The second group
consists mostly of economists who appear to share the view that fiscal
policy decisions are the exclusive prerogative of the economists at the
Treasury, and not the lesser mortals, the proletariat, organised in
trade unions. The latter position gives rise to the wrong notion that
‘economists and the Treasury know best.’
The demand by the
FUTA as well as well as FUTA’s responses to its critics debunks this
myth of exclusive privilege of policy-making monopoly in allocating
government expenditure that some economists seem to accord to the
Treasury, without listening to what the society, the people, the
citizens, and the so-called stakeholders have to say. In a way, it
reflects a specific culture of policy-making that has been advanced in
Sri Lanka and many developing countries under neo-liberal economic
reforms. As many critical studies of policy making under globalization,
structural adjustment programmes and neo-liberal reforms show,
economic policy making has now been reduced to a small group of an
exclusive elite whose members are the country’s President or the Prime
Minister, Finance or Economic Affairs Minister, the Treasury Secretary,
the resident representatives of the World Bank and the IMF, and a few
highly-paid expatriate or self-exiled policy consultants. The majority
of this group are unelected people, who are not accountable to the
people. Actually, one of the most undemocratic consequences of this
development for governance is that neither Parliament elected by the
people nor the Cabinet of Ministers consisting of people’s
representatives has any serious say in public policy-making. They can
only shout in anger when they do not get enough money for their
ministries! That is why our Parliament and the Cabinet have been
reduced to what they are today. In fact, one major indirect implication
of the FUTA demand is for the Cabinet and Parliament to retrieve their
right to decide priorities of public expenditure allocations in a
manner that serves the people of the country, their electors, not the
agenda of a small group of economists converted to the neo-liberal
ideology.
It is also necessary for our critics and for us
also to recognise that wage and economic demands of trade unions are
integrally linked to public policy, especially in a context where our
country is in a period of rapid policy change. That is precisely why
workers in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone opposed the pension reform
bill and organised demonstrations to show that opposition. It was an
open challenge to government policy and it reflected the fact that
economic welfare of the labour cannot be detached from the policy
decisions of the government. When public sector unions opposed
privatisation, they were challenging government policy. When the FUTA
is asking to allocate 6% of the GDP to education, it is demanding
policy reforms that directly affect their wage demands as well. In Sri
Lanka, many trade unions have now realised that their wage and service
conditions and government policies are so intertwined that improvement
in the first calls for re-orientation of the second.
Those
who know about trade union politics also know that advancing wage
demands alone by trade unions creates a paradoxical challenge in which
the wage demands benefit only its members, not the society at large.
This is a problem that has been debated in the trade union movement in
the world extensively, even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Sri Lanka, employers and governments have always resorted to the
tactic of branding wage demands of trade unions as having been
motivated by the selfish interests of the members. This, in fact,
happened during the first phase of the FUTA struggle. When a union
broadens its concerns and links itself with issues of public interests
that transcends the so-called selfish interests of its members, that
union is accused of going beyond its mandate!
Moreover, the
minimalist construction of the FUTA mandate by its critics is also a
position that refuses to consider FUTA as a stakeholder in education in
the country. It considers trade unions merely as organisations of
wage-slaves that should not exceed their wage-labour mandate. This is
actually a colonial as well as neo-liberal attitude to trade unions. It
is colonial because, during colonialism, no trade union or a citizens’
organisation was expected to challenge the state, state policy or
state officials. ‘Subjects’ did not have the right to challenge the
rulers. They had to fight for that right. It is neo-liberal because the
neo-liberal, as well as classical-liberal, ideology does not expect
the citizens to be active participants in the political or policy
process, except as passive individual citizens or minimally active
consumers. It is social democracy that took trade unionism beyond these
narrow confines and made trade unions active agents of social,
political and policy change. Most of the trade unions in Sri Lanka have
been nurtured in this social democratic tradition.
And it
is sad that this colonial, outdated and hierarchical attitude to trade
unionism is now being propagated by some of our own colleagues in the
universities, some of whom are members of our own unions. May be the
FUTA should organise a short course on trade unionism – Trade Union
Politics 1101 –for its members who still operate on the colonial
understanding of trade unions. In that course, some readings on new
trends in trade union politics globally could be easily distributed for
the benefit of all.
The role of trade unions as a
stakeholder of public policy is a key principle that the FUTA
highlights in the present phase of its struggle. This is a task that
FUTA should continue to uphold as within its trade union mandate.
