Self-serving trade union culture has to be changed

Post Master General (PMG) Ruwan Sathkumara said on Friday that postal workers have fraudulently obtained overtime payments worth millions of rupees and that he is deeply embarrassed by the fraudulent and inefficient actions of some postal service officials.
Participating in a ceremony held at the Haputale Post Office to coincide with Postal Day,  he said not adhering to new regulations to mark attendance through fingerprint machines has aggravated the issue.
The Postal chief related some interesting stories about the institution under his own watch. “They service vehicles on Sundays. They do it to get overtime payments. They are paid four hours of overtime to service a vehicle. Ten people claim overtime payments. So imagine how many vehicles like this will be serviced.” 
Then he narrated another incident which is ludicrous, but points to the degeneration the state institutions have slipped into. PMG Sathkumara said: “A telegram was sent to the Higher Education Ministry on September 2 from Pilimathalawa. It went there on October 3.”
It must be recalled, alongside  this lamentation by the Post Master General, that the postal workers launched a trade union action in August over 19 demands including one against the instalment of finger print machines to mark attendance. In the face of the government’s tough response,  they backed down. 
Although the question remains as to why telegrams are still being sent in this digital era in the first place, this is a very good instance to understand the place the public sector institutions have given to the concept of accountability. With these stories, we are being taken along the nostalgic memory lane to the good old days in 1970 and before when we were assured that a telegram would reach any remote place  in the country within one day, despite the telecommunication system being primitive and  rural sub-post offices covered a vast area where postmen had to trek on foot, back then. An ordinary letter from  Dondra Head in the south  reached Point Pedro in the north within a day or two.
The lethargy and   destruction of the public sector by  officials and  employees is not confined to the Postal Department; rather it is a cancer spread all over the state machinery. For instance, it was reported in 2021 even during the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant drop in the use of motor vehicles, the Ceylon Petroleum Storage Terminals Ltd. (CPSTL) which is part of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) spent close to Rs. 1.6 billion on overtime payments, with Rs. 1.17 billion and Rs 1.7 billion allocated for the years 2020 and 2019 respectively.
It was also said that some employees of the CPSTL had more overtime pay listed on the salary strips than their basic salary.This happened when the country was grappling with an unprecedented economic crisis and it is clear that this volume of OT is not possible without administrative support.
Excess number of employees
In 2022, the then Minister of Power and Energy, Kanchana Wijesekara had publicly stated that the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) and the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) have employees far in excess than required for the normal functioning of those institutions. He for instance cited that CPSTL had 4,200 employees where only 500 are required, and the CEB had around 26,000 employees when half that number was sufficient. He also stated that Rs. 3 billion had been paid as overtime for the workers at the Petroleum refinery at Sapugaskanda in 2021. How could the officials and  employees justify the overtime payment in an institution which has 4200 instead of 500 employees?
When Sri Lanka found itself embroiled in an economic crisis in 2022, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva attributed the situation to  mismanagement of the economy by  leaders of  successive governments. However, a part of the responsibility for the economic downturn must go to  officials and the employees of the public sector as well, especially to the trade unions and the political parties they are  affiliated to. Their ‘change the system, but leave me alone’ attitude must be changed first if the country is to progress.

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