On Thursday, there was a typical enactment of the politics of Sri Lanka. A Marxist party, not in office, launching a general strike, an Opposition mainstream party extolling the virtues of trade union action giving them some little muscle, and a Government trying desperately to show it is.

Not surprisingly, both sides claimed victory. Both parties are arguably correct, so we could call it a draw. But in such battles, there is only one loser - the voiceless public, but then, who cares about them, really?
The labour movement made its first impact during the colonial period with the tramcar strike against British domination.

The then Ceylon's Young Bolsheviks who schooled at the London School of Economics under the tutelage of Prof. Harold Laski who extolled the virtues of Karl Marx, were lectured on the 'sweat-shops' of Great Britain that spurred the need to mobilise the masses during the Industrial Revolution in that country. When these young men returned to their native land, there was no Industrial Revolution and no organised labour so they began their mission in the plantations and the mercantile sector. Independent Sri Lanka therefore, had a proud history of labour laws and trade union action; but on the flip-side, it also had a dismal record of strikes crippling the economy and retarding economic progress.

Striking labour plagued the economy starting in the 1950s and by the 1960s, every conceivable mercantile and public sector - and by then the plantation sector, had its trade unions ostensibly to protect the rights of the working class. But barring a few unions, they were largely controlled by political parties with agendas often at variance with those of the labour force.

Newly emerging nations in the world, especially in South East Asia ignored these niceties and banned trade unions while their economies 'took off' to great heights. Today, Sri Lankan citizens are employed in many of those nations as their housemaids due to the high standard of living in those countries.

In the early 1980s, the right-wing Government of the day broke a general strike with a sledgehammer. It introduced laws to ban trade unions in the Free Trade Zone it had set up so that the 'Robber Barons' could come and invest, and profit without the headaches of labour unrest. The ultimate objective, however, was to provide employment to the teeming unemployed, infuse foreign capital into an economy that was in shambles, raise the living standards of the people struggling to make ends meet, and generally uplift the nation into a modern commercial state.

The economic turnaround could not last long. An insurgency broke out, followed by another and by the mid-1990s, the economy began to shudder and stutter, but it had been wrested from the control of the State from its commanding heights, and despite all its shortcomings, the private sector was able to sustain it and prevent total collapse.

In this transfer of the commanding heights from the State to the private sector several 'deals' were done by Presidents no less, with their hatchet men placed in strategic positions plundering away, earning their commissions at will at the expense of the unsuspecting public.

Today, all types of shady deals are coming out into the public gaze, especially through the courts, some worth billions of rupees, with the full gamut of high stake racketeering, with off-shore bank accounts, money laundering and the works, being exposed.

While on the one hand the country saw strikes and trade union action retarding the economy, on the other, big-time wheeler-dealers were busy playing on the commanding heights of the economy, with political patronage. The end result was double jeopardy for the people from both sides of the spectrum.

Thursday's general strike call was purely a political exercise. It was a testing of the waters to see how unpopular the Government is. The problem is that whatever the popularity of the Government right now, general strikes are also not popular with the general public.

A strike is meant to be the ultimate instrument in trade union action; not a political tool used to destabilise a Government. What is worse is that strikes go against the work ethos; and no nation was built on strikes, but on hard work. 'Work harder for your larder' was the slogan that broken-down Britain used to rebuild after the ravages of World War II.

This is not to say that a Government that is deviating from the path of good governance must not be tested from time to time, politically and democratically. Either embarrassed by failure or buoyed by success of Thursday's general strike, the organising parties have announced their decision to launch a further series of strikes. But to do so with the already long-suffering commuter, patient and student as the guinea-pig is quite unfair, to put it ever so mildly.