Watz common btw Kerala & France?

You shud have guessed this !!
"Very High Rates of Literacy, supported by strong labor unions"......Right? Wrong.

Both these places are going down from their peak and loosing out on the unprecedented economic growth world is seeing now.

Kerala, state with highest literacy rate in India, has a very strong labor union movement (M not talkin bout CPI as yet). But unfortunately, the impression of this labor union is not of creating very conducive environment for businesses. They r thot to be anti-business rather than creating a "Responsible Labor Union". You can't tell them what to do, they won't obey orders, they can all read Economic Times (which they r very proud of), and they can hold any manufacturing unit on ransom. But what they have failed to see is that slowly industries are shying away Kerala. New industries (mainly Manufacturing units) are being setup in other states (neighbouring states mostly). Even the old units their investments, plants etc out of state. So ultimately who is lossing out?

The same old educated laborer reading ET in the morning, the state on its progress path, the community which could have dominated Indian Growth Story (because of its highly educated base, and initial lead in growth). Neither does mfg sector like it, nor does IT. I believe, as a community gets more educated it should strive to move up the value chain by adding more value per labour unit, in simple terms generating more revenue per labourer/worker i.e. engaging in white-collared jobs and doing specialised high-skill jobs. But even that is not happening.

Reason is simple to seek. Labor union leaders and political leaders who hold the power and to whom laborers have lend their voices, enjoy their status till people listen to them. Their derive their power by being able to misguide very educated ET reading laborers. They r keepin them brain-washed with their communist theories. I m neither a socialist nor a capitalist. I dont even disagree with communism. But i believe just for sake of protecting their own power, if leader of any of the wings (leftist, rightist), try enforcing their unworkable ideology on people, its wrong. Anything which brings prosperity is good. As one of the leaders said, u can distribute wealth, but if their is only poverty, what will u distribute. So u need to first create wealth & then distribute.

France too is going through a similar phase, wherein labor unions have gained too much power and people at the helm of affairs are unwilling to let it go. They want to work 32 hrs/week, when entire Europe can work 38-40 and even want to go down to 30. This unwillingness to work and more so to even fight, kill, burn to "Prevent Their Fundamental Right to Work" is gonna hamper France's long held super-power status. But France is far advanced economically, and it will take a long time for it to realize the long term affects of this stubbornness to "shirk", it will be too late to turn bak then.

I will end it by saying unions need strike a balance between how much power they assume for welfare of laborers and how much free-hand they give to entrepreneurs/businessman/corporate world. If they fail to maintain this balance (exercise too less or too much of pressure), in long term they stand to loose.

-Amit (Jhalak) Garg