In Papua-Ng
p. 13 · Read in the full issue
Native Labour System
NLO Treated By Employers As An Absurdity
AS a result of the untried and un balanced native labour system in troduced after the war in Papua- New Guinea by the Australian Govern ment, planters, miners and traders have been reluctantly compelled to support a recruiting system that is expensive, gener ally undesirable and apparently unlawful.
Under the old system, evolved in many decades of trial and error, a native labourer could be indentured for three years, and European employers regularly used the services of professional re cruiters, who went away into difficult and dangerous places after raw and un trained labour. Labourers, thus obtained, represented a heavy first-cost, and a loss in the first year of their service because they were usually quite untrained and often medically unfit. But the employers got a benefit later on. The employers cleaned them up, taught them better standards of living, and showed them how to be industrially useful, so that in the second and third year of their service their employment was profitable.
The new system limits iildenture to one year and resolutely bans professional re cruiters. Employers must do their own recruiting, or use a member of their staff for such duties.
Being desperately in need of labour, planters and miners in the past couple of years have evolved a system under which they accept recruits from professional re cruiters at a fee of from about £6 to £7 per head. The Government, of course, does not recognise professional recruiters.
Employers generally have got over this by forming themselves into associations; the recruiter is an employee of an em ployer’s association: and the recruiter’s “salary” is eoual to an amount represent ing from £6 to £7 per head on recruits he brings in.
Ofiicially, the Administration frowns upon the system—but it knows that if such a system does not operate, the em ployers will not get enough workers, and the Territories’ most valuable industries would languish.
The recruiters —of whom several are operating in Papua and New Guinea — bring in thousands of new labourers in the course of a year and, apparently, on £6 per head, are doing very well. But the recruiter’s costs are very high. He has often to go away into very difficult country; he has to provide transportation from the place of recruiting to the place of employment; and he has to pay in respect of each recruit, a sum of about 8/- for signing-on fees, and about 32/for a kit (which includes 2 calicos, a plate, pannikin, spoon, blanket, mosquito net, and two ramis).
Only the high price of copra allows the planter to pay this huge cost of getting labour. He no longer has the benefit of the three years’ indenture. Under the present Ordinance he must return the boy to his village at the end of twelve months.
As in most cases the training of the boy has required a number of months, the employer gets remarkably little benefit.
Any substantial fall in copra prices would make the system unworkable.
Territories employers generally are un animous in their belief that there is only one way in which this native labour situ ation can be properly dealt with—namely, the three years’ indenture system must be restored; the employment of professional recruiters must be re-established legally;
and it must be recognised that the Ad ministration has some other obligation in the Territory besides that of devoting all its thought and endless money to what it calls “native welfare.”
European employers do not care how strictly the Native Labour Ordinance is policed, so long as it is based on prac tical experience and commonsense. Em phatically, the present NLO is based on neither.