NOW WE JUST HAVE TO BREAK THE PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS:

When trade unions lose their power: The short-lived strike by Air India employees makes one thing clear: the days of rampant trade unionism are over (T N Ninan, 5/31/10, Rediff)

The country's mood has changed when it comes to industrial action. The official statistics say it too, loud and clear.

Guess how many cases of industrial action there were in all of 2009 - a grand total of 69, counting both strikes by workers and lock-outs by managements. The number of man-days lost was 2.27 million. Back in the heyday of unionism in the 1970s and the 1980s, it used to be 10 times that number.

If there is a single episode which made the tide turn, it was the prolonged strike in Mumbai's textile mills that Datta Samant led in 1982.

That ended with almost none of the mills re-opening, except under government control - only for the majority to shut down anyway. Workers in Mumbai learnt the hard lesson that those in Kolkata were already absorbing: if you pushed things too far, you not only would not get a wage hike, you would lose your job. There hasn't been another such industry-wide showdown in 28 years.