The strike by Fijian public servants which began last Thursday has ended without the government having agreed to the any of the unions’ demands. The strike was the result of mass anger among rank-and-file union members over a 5% pay cut and job losses imposed by the government as part of a package of neo-liberal austerity measures. Union leaders who had earlier been busy negotiating with government officials for a slightly smaller pay cut than the one originally proposed in the budget were literally forced by their members to call the industrial action despite their willingness to enter into a rotten compromise. Now that the rank-and-file have been allowed to let off steam though they have seized the opportunity to announce the cancellation of the strike in favour of legal action.
It is no secret that members of the Fijian Labour Party serving in the government have also played a key role in sabotaging any union resistance to the current round of wage cuts and retrenchments. This despite the fact that Labour leader Mahendra Chaudhry as the Minister of Finance is directly responsible for implementing these anti-worker policies!
On a more encouraging note members of the Fiji Nurses’ Association are still standing firm despite their strike heading already into its third week. Without support from the rest of the labour movement though it is hard to see how much longer they can continue the struggle…
August 9, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Is it a labor party, the left can atleast caucus in?
August 10, 2007 at 2:14 am
You need to get behind my World Revolution!
http://beninski.blogspot.com/
August 10, 2007 at 4:01 pm
“Is it a labor party, the left can atleast caucus in?”
The short answer is no – the Fijian Labour Party is now “labour” only in name, being more of a race-based party which represents (or aspires to represent) the interests of the ethnic Indo-Fijian community.
When the first Labour Party government was elected in 1987 under Timoci Bavadra the FLP had support from both Fijian and Indo-Fijian sections of the working class, however that government was overthrown by a right-wing nationalist coup as was the second FLP govt of Mahendra Chaudhry in 2000.
Both coups were supported by the conservative ethnic Fijian tribal elites who feared a loss of their traditional power and in particular the prospect of land reform (under the Fijian constitution only ethnic Fijians i.e. the tribal elites could own land).
Ironically, the very failure of the FLP to deliver radical reforms when in office and the polarising effect of successive nationalist coups led most of the non-Indo Fijian leaders to decamp from the FLP.
This has led not only to the emergence of rival communally based parties competing for the working class vote but even to the splitting of the union movement along racial lines. This is a key reason for the weakness of the union resistance to the current regime’s austerity measures, since a big part of the union bureacracy and the FLP support the military government as the lesser of two evils (unlike the previous coup administrations it came to power by overthrowing not the FLP but a conservative ethnic Fijian regime, the SDL of Qarase, and it is therefore seen as being more favorable to Indo-Fijians, despite its continuation of neoliberal policies).