Re: The DSP, Fiji and indigenous land claims

["Workers World, Chicago Bureau" <wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 7:25 PM
Subject: Re: The DSP, Fiji and indigenous land claims


>It would be helpful if you could provide some statistics on the ethnic
>composition of the Fiji trade unions. I am under the impression that the
>overwhelming majority of indigenous peoples are involved in subsistence
>agriculture and fall outside the jurisdiction of the trade unions, but
>perhaps I am wrong

No, you're not :-)  I have a figure of 45,000 trade union members, but I
have a feeling that this includes the farmers in the National Farmers Union,
who probably come to about 15,000 .  As to the rest, it's variable.  Some
unions are mostly Fijian, others mostly Indo-Fijian.  The teachers are
mostly Fijian, and I believe the nurses are too.  But when the nurses went
on strike a week before the coup, Chaudhry declared the strike illegal, and
the Fijian Trade Union Congress (FTUC) refused to support the strike.  The
nurses were accused of trying to embarrass the government.

The head of FTUC is Tony Alexander, who is head of the Sugar and General
Workers Union.  These are Indo-Fijians who work in the government-owned
sugar mills.  Chaudhry, as past secretary of the NFU, has a fine
relationship with Alexander.  There's a geographical basis to this too - the
west of Viti Levu (the largest island) has the bulk of the sugar industry
and also of tourism, and is thus the richest part of the island.  (Over the
years Chaudhry has developed a relationship with the chiefs out there - the
people who would be called "native elite" if they were aligned with Speight.
There are rumours that Chaudhry is going to set up a rival government in
western Viti Levu, which is a great situation if you like civil war and U.N.
peacekeepers.)

There is also a gold mine in Fiji.  The mine workers were almost all
indigenous Fijian, though I'm not sure if that's still true.  Their union is
the Fiji Mine Workers Union, but they went on strike in 1991 or so and the
strike has never been settled as far as I know.  (I found a reference to
Chaudhry visiting them last year, but I never found anything about the
strike being settled.) They have been camped in front of the mine entrance
for this whole time.  Meanwhile they were decertified and replaced by a
group called the Mine Workers' Council; I'm not sure of their ethnicity, but
I think they're still indigenous, since I read a story about how the sons of
the strikers were working in the mines today, some of them.  The FMWU strike
has been a bitter and heroic one and got some solidarity from Australian
Labour.  But the head of the union wasn't Labour - he was a MP with the Fiji
Nationalist Party.

In general I think the labour unity situation worsened after the 1987 coup.
For example, the Public Service Association (Chaudhry's main union) split
and an indigenous union was formed, the Viti Public Service Association.  I
don't know if it still exists, though.  There are two conflicting
explanations for this.  On the one hand, there's the FLP-ist explanation
that the indigenous unions were set up by the Rabuka forces to confuse the
indigenous workers with 'chauvinism' etc.  On the other hand, it seems that
the Rabuka government tried to bring more indigenous Fijians into public
sector jobs, and the Indo-Fijian-led unions resisted this.  Affirmative
action measures have too often been treated as "racist" measures in
Indo-Fijian parlance.  Also, the head of the FLP in 1987 was I think also
the head of the PSA at the time, an indigenous leader named Bavedra.  But he
died in 1989, and Chaudhry took over, and also simultaneously became an
official with the NFU.

If Norm and Alan and Phil aren't too mad at us now, maybe they could
actually help us out with some of the hard data here.

There is a site for the Fiji Trade Union Congress, which lists their
affiliates, at

http://www.fiji.nu/ftuc/index.shtml