Tampoe: an angry May Day

By Roshan Peiris

In the Ceylon Mercantile Industrial and General Workers' Building which looks like a high security institution, which Colonel Gaddafi might envy, sat Bala Tampoe shouting into a telephone about "suppressing trade union news."

For fifty years the General Secretary of the Ceylon Mercantile Union, Bala Tampoe has often galvanised democratic mass workers to strike out for their rights.

Tampoe's thoughts on May Day this year are shrouded in gloom. This respected leader of the Workers' Movement is an angry man.

"It is utter hypocrisy for the Government to celebrate May Day with the Postal Union strike unsettled," he said when The Sunday Times met him last week.

Uppermost in the mind of the dedicated Trade Unionist was a seething anger that the crisis in the Postal Department remained unsettled and that the Union of Posts and Telecommunications Officers representing over 5000 officers had never been met by the Minister for two years.

"To commemorate May Day we want to emphasise the fact that since the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, it has been fixed by the law in the U.S.A. and Europe and later in the early 1930s over here, that a person, man or woman cannot be compelled to work for more than eight hours. A worker can do so, only if he consents with the overtime given as an inducement. But even this cannot be forced. He should work overtime only if he or she, for that matter, wants to.

"Members of the UPTO therefore decided that they will not work for overtime inducements because they had a host of accumulated grievances in the last two years and the Minister has not bothered to meet and talk about their problems, not even once.

"So the workers are keeping to their eight hour rule. The Government has the gall with this sort of issue pending to celebrate May Day which is a day to mark the solidarity of the working class and manifest it in demonstrations and meetings," he said.

Contrary to belief, May Day over here does not constitute dancing round a May Pole as in the 40's when A. E. Goonesinghe danced baila on the streets in a red shirt with women in cloth and blouses. Also May Day is not a tamasha the like of which President Premadasa introduced with singers and dancers brought from India," said Tampoe.

"The SLFP makes it, whether in or out of Government, a political propaganda event. May Day is a serious business and the LSSP had the right idea before it joined the SLFP in 1964.

"May Day, dedicated to the workers" said a sweating and angry Bala Tampoe "is today a serious business as it should be, always."

The story of the CMU and Bala Tampoe is an interesting one to recall on May Day. The very first strike of the CMU was by 55 workers of Plate in 1949 followed in 1956 with a lockout of The Times of Ceylon (not we, thank goodness!).

Now everyone is in the act of talking about human rights. The CMU defended the growth of human rights organisations by its early benign acts of wearing black ties during the General Strike of 1947 that hurried the British to grant independence, albeit limited.

Today Bala Tampoe, older, slim, grey and angry, looks like some prophet of yore, sincere in his convictions and still never wavering from his devotion to the working class of this country.

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