A Chinese proverb says:“the wise man does not hit the fly on his friend’s head with an axeâ€
In everyday language, a strike always hurts someone, and that is its purpose, but are you hurting the right people?
Teachers may be popular with their pupils for a short time if they don’t teach for a day or two, but even the children will start complaining if the strike goes on for long.
Most of them want to learn, so while they enjoy an extra day or two of holiday, they don’t want a long time with no teaching. They know they will have to work harder after the strike if they want to catch up.
No doctor who lets a patient die when s/he has the power to save the patient is popular with anybody.
Council workers who let piles of rubbish build up in the streets are not popular with the people who have to wade through all that stuff when they are going about their daily business, What is worse is that the employers who are not paying them don’t care whether we have to wade through rivers of sewage to go to the shops or to work.
Simply stopping work and saying you are striking for justice in all these cases is like hitting the fly off your friend’s head with an axe. You are more likely to kill your friend than to kill the fly.
What we need is a bit of analysis. Before you go on strike, you should ask yourselves who do you want to put pressure on – if your well-considered action hurts them, that is because they are stubborn and you may need to wait until they feel the pain more acutely before they listen to you and you can go back to work. That is their choice. You should also ask yourselves whose support do you want and take care not to upset them.
In Italy, when the railways still employed ticket sellers and ticket collectors, if the workers wanted more pay or better working conditions, they declared a strike, which meant only the ticket collectors stopped work. Passengers could still travel, but nobody asked them to pay, so they were happy. The employers were not happy because somebody had to pay to keep the trains running, and they knew the bills would come to them. That kind of strike never lasted long.
I can’t say exactly how our civil servants could put that kind of pressure on the people who are not paying them. Perhaps council workers should collect our rubbish and dump it in front of the house of the person who decides when and how they are paid? That might be the mayor, or it might be a government minister, but you get the idea. Some government offices could probably continue to issue permits, IDs, passports for some time without collecting fees. I don’t know how long a hospital could run like that, before it ran out of bandages, medicines and other necessities, but we should all put our heads together. We want to help you put pressure on the fat cats in Borrowdale, not the poor and sick in Mbare.
Post published in: Opinions