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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 5. April 2 1968

Union Strife In Fiji

Union Strife In Fiji

"We refuse to negotiate with a pistol at our heads", is one of those familiar bromides of industrial relations everywhere. But the reference was more than figurative last January when, during the third day of a public arbitration in Suva between the Airport, Hotel and Catering Workers' Union, and Qantas Airways, the unionists present, James Anthony and Apisai Tora, demanded their Qantas opponents be immediately searched for pistols and revolvers.

This incident was a culmination of previous charges about Qantas officials threatening Fijian employees with pistols at Nandi Airport during a three week strike last October. Whatever the murky truth, the allegations in themselves are indicative of the still unfortunately immature state of industrial relations within the colony.

While there has been a considerable increase since 1960 in both registered unions and union membership, there is neither compulsory registration for workers nor compulsory arbitration and concilation procedures. At present there are some twenty effective unions with a total membership of 15,000. Two thirds of this membership is concentrated in four major unions—The Public Employees, The Dockworkers and Seamen, The Mine-workers and the Sugar and General Workers, which are affiliated to the Fiji Traders Union Congress.

In recent years there has been a steady increase in collective bargaining and other organised methods of wage fixing. Disputes in the sugar industry, if not settled through negotiations, ore taken to the Fiji Sugar Board for conciliation.

However the great majority of manual workers are outside any formal union structure, having their basic wages and conditions settled either by collective agreements or by orders of statutory wages Councils (where worker representation is always in a minority) covering fields such as transport, construction, and catering.

Now at a higher level, under a fledgling system, a Minister for Labour, Ratu Edward Cakobau, assisted by a Commissioner, Mr. Ken Harrap, acts as a conciliator in disputes and also as civil service head of the Labour Department.

By Roderic Alley, Teaching Fellow, Political Science Department

By Roderic Alley, Teaching Fellow, Political Science Department

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.

No statistics

Professor Donald Cochrane of Monash University, who arbitrated in the Qantas dispute, has recently awarded wage increases of between 2d. and 4d. to the airport workers. This has resulted in stop-work protests, and strong denunciations by both Tora and Anthony. The latter was staging a sit-in protest at Monash University against the decision. Professor Cochrane stated that with sugar prices low and with unemployment rising there are too many unknowns in the current economic situation in Fiji to suggest a higher figure.

During this arbitration the Financial Secretary of Fiji, Mr. J. Ritchie, admitted that no statistics were kept of the amount of money leaving Fiji from direct investments made largely by Australians. Nor was any reference made to Fiji's outmoded and inefficient fiscal system, nor to such absurdities as the high import bills paid out for rice, beef, cereals and, of all things, fish.

Whether militant unionism in itself will ever force the structural changes needed in the Fijian economy is debatable. Further industrial upheaval is probably inevitable until the political leadership begins to tackle unpalatable issues—hitherto sacrosant questions, such as traditional land ownership, provided the emergent labour force will of necessity be directed to such sectors as agriculture. Taxation of foreign investment, a far better developed statistical service, particularly in relation to cost of living indices, and a greater direct encouragement to the growth of the unions themselves, must also rank high on any list of priorities aimed at future industrial peace in Fiji.