There is a peculiar contradiction sitting at the heart of Sri Lanka's labour movement. Ask any student of this country's political history and they will tell you, correctly, that almost every protection a working Sri Lankan enjoys today, from the eight-hour day to the Employees' Provident Fund, exists because trade unions fought for it, often at great personal cost. Ask the average commuter stranded by a railway strike, or a parent whose child's examination has been postponed by a teachers' union action, and they are likely to describe trade unions as an obstacle to daily life rather than its defender. Both views are held sincerely, and both, uncomfortably, contain truth.

This tension was given fresh context recently when National Labour Advisory Council member and veteran trade unionist Anton Marcus revealed that barely nine per cent of Sri Lanka's workforce now belongs to a union. His argument was that the State's energies would be better spent protecting workers’ constitutional right to organise, a right guaranteed under Article 14(1)(d) but, as he noted, rarely enjoyed in practice, than on restructuring exercises such as the proposed merger of the EPF and ETF under a single governance framework.

Marcus is not wrong about the history. The movement's roots run through figures such as A E Goonesinghe, N M Perera and Philip Gunawardena, who organised plantation labourers, railwaymen and urban workers and tied their grievances directly to the wider cause of Independence. Sustained union pressure produced the Trade Union Ordinance of 1935 and the Industrial Disputes Act of 1950, and eventually the social security architecture Sri Lankans now take for granted: the EPF, the ETF, gratuity payments and maternity protections. This was not won cheaply. In July 1980, over a hundred thousand workers struck for a wage increase amid runaway inflation, and a union branch secretary, D Somapala, was killed when explosives were thrown into a peaceful crowd near the Colombo General Hospital. Three decades later, in May 2011, a young factory worker named Roshen Chanaka was shot dead by Police during protests against the proposed Pension Benefits Fund Bill in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone. His death forced the Government to withdraw the legislation. These are not distant footnotes. 

Even today, unions continue to do work that rarely makes headlines: defending real wages against inflation, extending organisation to domestic workers and informal retail staff who have no other advocate, and acting as a check on corruption and non-transparent privatisation within State institutions. None of this fit neatly into the public's current, largely negative, image of what a trade union is.

That image has been shaped, fairly or not, by a narrower set of actors. When the GMOA calls a strike, patients miss treatment. When railway unions down tools, commuters are stranded and the economy loses working hours. When teachers' unions take action, examinations are postponed and a generation of students absorbs the disruption. When private bus unions halt services, daily wage earners lose income they cannot recover. These are not abstract inconveniences, and the public has understandably grown weary of bearing them. 

Add to this the widely held perception that many major unions maintain close, sometimes overt, ties to political parties, and that strikes are timed to coincide with election cycles or anti-Government campaigns rather than called as a genuine last resort, and it becomes easier to understand why the term "trade union" now carries as much suspicion as respect. When disputes centre on duty free vehicle permits or administrative grade allowances rather than shared worker welfare, or when unions in loss making State enterprises resist merit-based reform and modernisation, the movement risks looking less like a defender of the working class and more like a guild protecting its own.

Marcus himself gestures towards this problem when he concedes that certain unions working with political motives bear some responsibility for the decline in membership. But the more common explanation he offers, that workers who join unions face harassment, transfers and reprisal from employers, deserves to be taken just as seriously. It is entirely possible for both diagnoses to be true at once: that ordinary workers are simultaneously deterred from joining unions by employer intimidation, and put off by a public perception that the loudest unions no longer represent their interests.

Sri Lanka's trade unions do not need to choose between their history and their future. But if they wish the public to remember the former, they will need to start acting like they deserve the latter.