Budget heavily weighted in favour of capitalist interests-union

The Sri Lanka’s budget for 20201 aims to ease the tax burden of capitalists while sacrificing the government’s own sources of revenue, a trade union accused on Monday. 
“It has largely ignored the needs of the working class, which is by and large exploited by the private sector paying starvation wages due to an unprincipled arrangement agreed to by the ‘yellow’ unions at the behest of the government supposedly as a measure to deal with COVID-19. The urgings of most unions to terminate this arrangement continue to fall on deaf ears,” the Ceylon Federation of Labour (CFL) said.  
Its statement said:
“The maiden budget of the government coming as it does during a widespread surge in the COVID-19 pandemic both globally and locally hides more than reveals the true state of the country’s economy. No mention is made and no solutions proffered to deal with the high levels of debt, both local and foreign, and the catastrophic slide in foreign earnings from worker remittances and tourism contributing to a sharp depreciation of the Sri Lankan rupee exacerbated by money printing and volatility in interest rates.
The many accolades from the business world expose the true orientation of the government’s plans and its budget for 2021, the promotion of business interests over those of the masses of the country. 
Although incomes of up to Rs. 250,000 per month have been exempt from income tax, this has hardly any effect on workers, who are mostly not subject to income tax. The long promised wage increases for public servants and pensioners seems to have been forgotten, the only concessions offered to public servants being loans to solar power their homes and a cap of 7% per annum on housing loan interest. The government has abdicated its responsibility to assist those who lost their jobs through COVID, proposing instead an insurance scheme funded by a 0.25% levy on the turnover of all large businesses which would be used to compensate those in the retail and wholesale trades and in hotels.
Estate workers are promised the long fought for Rs. 1000 per day demanded in 2018 but it would take effect only in January 2021. Taking inflation into account, the figure should have been Rs. 1150 per day. The conditions which would as usual be attached by the all-powerful management companies to the package to dilute its effect is yet to be revealed. The government plans to obtain concurrence by the companies through threatening changes to management agreements if they do not conform, a process which could very well drag on in the courts. If the government is sincere in providing estate workers with a pay rise, the easier and instant option would be to use the power of the ‘golden share’ that it holds in management companies to enforce the wage increase, something it can easily do.
The government plans to increase the retirement age for employees from 55 years to 60 years and this too through amending the EPF Act. It is therefore obvious the government’s intention is to stop payment of retirement benefits from the EPF fund for 5 years to enhance its fund pool. This together with the proposed contributory pension scheme for the self-employed are obviously not concessions to workers but a strategy to make available more worker funds for access by government to supplement its finances. The unrestrained appropriation of EPF funds by government resulting in lower returns to workers continues to pose a threat to the viability of the fund as revealed every year by Central Bank’s Financial Highlights documents since 2017. It is unethical for the government to deploy captive EPF funds that are individually owned by workers without their consent. The present proposal would seriously affect employees, especially women, who have already made plans to retire in the next few years. It would have been only fair to provide workers with the existing option of retiring earlier during the next five years. The government could also examine the possibility of introducing a national retirement age and a universal old age monthly pension payment to go with it.
Despite the 20th amendment concentrating all powers of government in the Executive Presidency being presented as a means to enforce transparency and accountability in public and corporate transactions while eliminating waste, corruption, favouritism, nepotism and cronyism, the public domain is rife with allegations of instances where none of this has been adhered to by the government.
No concrete measures have been forthcoming in the 2021 Budget to check the perceptible deterioration of social conditions in recent years. The vulgar pursuit of neo-liberal policies and the dirty, dangerous, poorly paid, insecure, dehumanising atypical employment bereft of dignity of labour that it has brought us has resulted in the persistence of poverty, increased inequality and widespread malnutrition among women and children. Employment has become increasingly vulnerable to market forces, external trade conditions and, now the economic disruption caused by COVID-19. The need of the hour is an unemployment benefit insurance scheme, but that unfortunately finds no place in the 2021 Budget.
Despite relentless rhetoric by the present government against neoliberalism, the continued pursuit of free market policies fails to bring any tangible relief to the poor and working poor who are undergoing untold hardships trying to make ends meet. Numerous gazettes issued by the all-powerful Executive President to bring down the cost of living have had little effect and appear to be intended to mislead the masses as efforts to forcibly control prices in a market driven economy is well known to be a futile exercise.
Workers have been given a raw deal in this budget and the government is aware of the possibility of mass action and working class struggles as revealed by the massive budget allocation of Rs. 2,500 million for the police and even more funds to the military to enhance public security. New surveillance methods which are being experimented with such drones, have the hallmarks of the first steps to the creation of a police state.”