<B>By Raj JUGERNAUTH</B>

The debate around the Employment Relations Bill will be focused these days around the right to strike. Not that this Bill is all negative. It is more or less a balancing exercise in an effort to please at the same time the labour force and investors, especially would be investors.

One would think that the tightening of existing laws on strikes cannot but be a signal sent to these investors by the labour party, at its own risk and peril. In fact, the minister of Labour should carefully watch his future electoral steps for his Bill is full of legal minefield for workers and unions on their way to strikes, making even a one-hour strike impossible. Trespassers would then shift from employment to unemployment in a matter of minutes; and such a mishap involving groups of workers would mean havoc for the minister and his party if it happens before next elections.

Looking at what is happening abroad, we see that the Mauritian minister of Labour is only copying what has already been adopted as far as strikes are concerned in Great Britain, for example. There is no such things as the right to strike in the British Common Law. In fact, since the 80?s, the British Government has been very busy curtailing the right to strike and has made strike almost illegal throughout his majesty?s kingdom.

A quasi absence of the right to strike is one of the features of Anglo-Saxon influenced labour legislations. Striking was still legal at the end of the 1980s in Great Britain. It was only in 1992 that the law of that country required ballots before industrial action.

Mauritius seems to be moving in that direction and proposes to give to employers, and the Prime minister, the right to ask the court to declare any strike or threatened strike illegal.Even if all the procedures has been followed by the unions !

It was the Labour Party, under sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, which voted the Industrial Act in 1973, making strikes, in effect, illegal. Mauritius was still in the trauma of the 1971 general strikes. The country was still asking itself if these strikes were staged to better the working conditions and pay packages of workers, or to destabilize the Labour government which had lost, at that particular time, its legitimacy. That governement won the 1976 elections and when it was kicked out of power in 1982, the country went through political tremors followed by what is today known as the Mauritian economic miracle. No one dared then to question the absence of the right to strike as all heads were turned towards Singapore and Lee Kwan Yew?s recipe of economic success.

Since then, Mauritius has made a long way forward. We should perhaps now turn our head a little towards South Africa. In the country of Nelson Mandela, the right to strike is written into the Constitution. As in France, for example.

But in South Africa, the right of employers to lock out their workers is not expressly included in the Constitution. However, the Labour Relations Act grants employers this right in certain situations. This indicates that this country has a set of labour legislations which is more pro-workers than pro-employees. And South Africa is fairing well. The right to strike has not been a hindrance to economic development in that country.