October 23, 2025 01:09 AM IST
First published on: Oct 23, 2025 at 01:09 AM IST
All too often, in this age of disconnection and scattered focus, employee dissatisfaction is expressed in symbolic gestures — individual acts of defiance that amount to “lying down” on the job (tang ping as practised by China’s youth, for example) or doing the bare minimum (as seen in the post-pandemic wave of “quiet quitting”). Creating ripples that quietly and quickly dissipate, there is little about these actions that inspires change or provokes a reaction. Before the great, well-oiled machinery of capital and industry, they are the most minor of irritants, abstractions that are easy to brush aside or roll over.
Which is what makes the protest launched last Saturday by workers at a toll plaza on the Agra-Lucknow highway remarkable. Unhappy over the paltry Diwali bonus they received, 21 staffers raised the barriers and walked off the job, thus allowing over 5,000 vehicles to breeze through without paying the hefty toll: An elegant execution of the hit-em-where-it-hurts school of attack usually reserved for the boxing or wrestling ring. As an act of protest against an employer trying to economise at the expense of workers, it doesn’t get more impactful than this. Not surprisingly, the company operating the toll booth agreed that very night to hike the striking staffers’ pay.
Beyond being a Diwali miracle of sorts, the episode is an affirmation of why the underdog story continues to matter. It’s easy enough to throw up one’s hands, allow the big and small indignities of the everyday to erode the will to fight and replace what could be a rallying cry with a sigh of defeat. The protest in that one toll plaza in Uttar Pradesh comes, then, as a reminder that the small guy, too, can win — all it takes is collective will and knowing where to hit.
