To Labour with the State: The Fiji Public Service Association (review)

To Labour with the State: The Fiji Public Service Association, by Jacqueline Leckie. Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1997. ISBN 1-877133-32-9, 221 pages, illustrations, maps, photographs, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, US$29.95.

Fiji is a deceptively small place that invites superficial commentary. Focusing on exotic cultural traits, the outside observer generally comes away with a tourist viewpoint--a superficial, shallow impression. Scholars have begun to penetrate this fog and are producing incisive studies of a very complex political economy. Studies such as Brij Lal's Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians have opened the complex society to a better understanding. British colonial rule in Fiji and the attendant, dominant sugar economy set the pattern of economic and political development for modern Fiji. The Australian sugar company, Colonial Sugar Refinery, initially used a mix of Melanesian and Gilbert Islanders for its workforce. Indian indentured labor proved to be a more reliable and convenient labor source, beginning in 1879 and becoming the dominant source after 1886. Increasing costs of Melanesian labor and the political outcry against "native labour" abuses made the shift necessary (Moore, Leckie, and Munro: Labour in the South Pacific, 1990).

At the beginning of the twentieth century Fiji was a multiethnic society dominated by the British colonial civil service and monolithic sugar production. The end of indentured labor in 1916 led Colonial Sugar Refinery to gradually withdraw to sugar milling, leaving the cane production to small, family farms.

The gradual changes in the British colonial world system were reflected in Fiji. The indirect British rule established in 1874 encouraged a native administration, depending on Fijian chiefs to maintain "traditional authority" (29). Gradually a new type of civil servant developed. Education and experience were the sources of authority rather than hereditary status. Leckie traces the slow development of the public service sector unions through the 1920s and 1930s. The early origins were encouraged by the state so long as the organization remained a salaried association, carefully following civil service rules. The civil service was the dominant employer outside the agricultural sector.

Although unions had been carefully suppressed, sometimes with violence as in the strikes of 1920 and 1921, workers nonetheless formed the Fijian Labour Federation in 1920 (Moore, Leckie, and Munro 1990). This marked the beginnings of politicization of the Indo-Fijian working class. As the sugar economy developed, the number of hired workers outside the family farms increased sharply. Given the colonial power structure and the oppressive labor legislation in place, worker resistance to exploitation frequently had to be expressed in other than traditional trade union responses.

With independence in 1970, many of the tensions built up over the years were released and came into political developments. The 1970s was a time of testing of the state by the civil service workers. The Fiji Public Service Association (FPSA), led by Mahendra Chaudhary, a militant trade unionist, challenged the state industrial relations machinery with a three-day civil servants strike in 1973. A determined effort to defend the rights of their members by aggressively pursuing grievances and disciplinary actions created a union grounded in personal and workplace relations.

A proposed thirteen-percent cut in wages and salaries conflicted with the demand for more adequate social services in Fiji, particularly in medical services. Strikes and conflicts in the 1980s further sharpened the conflict between the state and labor. FPSA members shut down the Fijian airports for two days in October 1983 over the loss of a cost-of-living adjustment. The growing strength of the Fijian Labour Party, closely tied to the Fiji Public Service Association and other unions, threatened the dominance of the governing Alliance party.

A major contribution of this work is the clear exposition of the class relations in Fiji. Leckie does much to penetrate the cultural fog that has surrounded Fijian political events. The 1987 military coup led by Sitiveni Rabuka was generally described...