Higher wages

Mr. Harrap told me he felt the procedures for wage fixing and settlement of disutes were adequate, and that the majority were accepting voluntary conciliation. This has usually led to annual wage increases of no more than 2d. an hour, or 3%, with the average wage now standing at 2s. 6d. per hour for a 44-hour week.

Education fees may often be as high as £7 a term for a child of primary school age, while rent, food and clothing, particularly in the Suva-Nausori area will cost a family of five at least £10 a week.

The arguments against paying higher wages, advanced by both employers and government, have been given their clearest expression in the Turner report last year. After a period of only six weeks in the colony, and working under the disadvantage of Fiji's incomplete statistics, Professor Turner, a British economist, concluded that a wages policy with a guideline of a 5% annual increase was needed, and machinery should be established to put it into effect.

Contrary to this thinking came the bombshell of Justice Gallagher's award, last year, of increases of up to 30/-a week to airport firemen. This represented an increase of 20% in wages and immediately encouraged the militant Tora wing of the union movement to test Qantas by asking for wage increases of up to 4s 8d. an hour, school fee payments, and higher overtime and bonus rates.

The government's attitude immediately stiffened. Never happy with either Tora, nor James Anthony, the Fiji-Indian post-graduate student in Political Science (now based in Canberra at the Australian National University) who flew back to Suva to argue the union's case, they saw, perhaps too willingly, deep political implications.

Rightly or wrongly, Ratu Mara and his alliance have seen in the Suva transport stoppages of last October when violence and intimidation was threatening and a state of emergency briefly proclaimed, the arson of hotel workers' bures, and this Qantas dispute, the hand of the Indian Federation Party.

Despite the Trade Union Congress being largely hamstrung by racial differences, and the divisions according to race as seen in the split between the Government Workers' Union (Fijian) and Public Employees' Union (Indian), it is more than doubtful if the union movement generally threatens as some vehicle or tool of a major communal confrontation in the colony.

Economic problems are starting to threaten both major races equally. With inadequate job training and apprenticeship schemes for blue collar and skilled work, coupled incidentally with a social pressure by both Fijians and Indians to enter white collar jobs, and with more than 50,000 young people between 15 and 20 entering the labour market, all unions are developing a vital, if at times confused, involvement in these questions.