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Kathmandu Friday March 16, 2001 Chaitra 03, 2057.
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Ten percent solution
In whatever fashion the dispute in the hotel
industry over a ten percent service charge demand is eventually resolved, it will go down
as the sorriest ever episode in the history of tourism in Nepal. Strikes by hotel workers
over the demand have brought the hotels to their knees and given Nepal a bad name abroad
where the potential tourists are. The knock on effect on the rest of the tourism sector
has been serious. The economy as whole has suffered both because of the reduced intake of
tourist rupees and dollars and the adverse effect on ancillary services. Tourism, the one
bright spot in the otherwise none too rosy economic prospects facing the country, has
stood on its head to squeeze out more per individual tourist.
Nepal has few natural resources to fall back
upon and the chances of tapping our undoubted hydroelectric potential is still largely a
mirage. Whatever manufacturing capability we have faces uncertainty in the face of
Nepal’s looming membership of the world trade organisation, one of whose aims is to
open up the market here to outside competition. The garment and carpet industries have
already run into the ceiling and pashminas are following suit. Remittances from Nepalese
workers abroad have yet to attain anything like full potential. Against this backdrop,
tourism was the one sector that has performed and can be expected to keep on performing if
only it is spared serious labour trouble. It was with high hopes for this industry that
the Visit Nepal Year was organised a few years ago. And although its success was somewhat
dubious, the country is even now embarked on the Destination Nepal Year soon to tap the
potential that tourism still portends. So what exactly went wrong?
The deadlock between hotel workers who would
settle for nothing less than the ten percent service charge and proprietors who would have
none of it as well as the government’s own involvement constitute an example of how
not to drive a perfectly sound industry into the ground. The hotel workers have been
pressing home a demand for something which is far from universal in the industry worldwide
and which the government’s own committee report on the issue stopped short of
endorsing. Hotel proprietors pleaded sheer inability to meet the demand without having
their businesses go under. But they failed to respond robustly to allegation by employees
that they kept two sets of books to hide their real bottom line. They instead stuck to
their guns and called on the government to declare the industry an essential service not
subject to industrial action. The government for its part failed to act at all for a
longish spell. When it did act it failed to call the bluff by either conceding the
hoteliers’ demand or going after the parallel books. Worse still, it is now emerging
that both the ruling and opposition parties have hailed to rein in their respective trade
union affiliates which have backed the hotel workers’ militancy. It has even been
suggested that the trade unions were allowed to push the hotel industry to the brink so
that it would become amenable to contributing generously to party coffers. That is simply
no way to treat a vital sector of the economy.
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