Suva's Price Spiral Worries

Permanent Hotel Guests

From Our Own Correspondent

Suva, Oct. 23.

INCREASES in Suva’s cost of living, caused this time by hotel rates and meal charges, has touched off a quiet but serious revolt among the many em ployees brought from New Zealand and Australia by large and small commercial firms.

October 22 saw a series of deputations to the heads of various businesses who were told, in effect, that as things are at Suva to-day it is impossible for workers from overseas to show anything like a reasonable .margin between a moderate salary and expenditure on the barest essentials.

The situation, which has been build ing up for the last two years or more, has now reached the stage where em ployees who were luted io Fiji with great difficulty have left again within a fortnight because of the obvious im possibility of making ends meet. Long established office-workers, a few of them in key positions, have gone back to New Zealand this year despite offers of salary increases if they would stay.

Top executives have been faced with the problem of replying to requests for transfers anywhere away from Suva; or, alternatively, making very substantial in creases in their firm’s wages bills. If nothing is done there will undoubtedly be resignations, with virtually no pros pect of securing replacements.

The cost of the plainest living at Suva, including increased direct taxation, has risen by 80 per cent, since the end of the Second World War. No reliable esti mate of wage increases in the same period is available, but it is reasonable to say thft the average sal£p:y of em ployees who have come into the Colony from overseas has not risen by more than 25 per cent. In many cases the increase is much less.

The result is that many capable men and women who could command very comfortable pay in their own countries have, in Suva, no margin for saving and see little prospect of improvement. Fiji’s income tax level is lower than that of the dominions, but this advantage is can celled out, several times over, by other factors.

THE spark that produced the final ex plosion is the fact that from No vember 1, casual rates at the Suva hotels will be decontrolled and will go up to £1 a day or more. This does not include the Grand Pacific, which has a higher scale of its own (not yet an nounced) but covers the five central hotels in Suva, three of which are ex tremely venerable.

Casual meals, and meals paid for on a monthly basis, have gone up corres pondingly. Three meals a day will cost £l4/10/- a month. Single meals will cost 4/- (4/6 in one case) for breakfast, 5/- for luncheon and 6/- for dinner. The standard of the meals provided ranges from moderate-to-good down to adequate-but-uninspired.

Rates for “permanents” in these hotels have reached a maximum of from £l7 to £l9 a month. Some proprietors are prepared to make concessions on the maximum; others are not.

This development has produced a scurry-round by hotel residents who,

rightly or wrongly, regard the new charges as out of all proportion to the return received by the individual resi dent.

In some cases employers have offered to raise the salaries of essential em ployees who live at hotels solely because of the scarcity of other accommodation.

Some workers, however, point out that if their services justify this increase they themselves are entitled to the benefit and not the hotels, which, whatever ad

vantages they may offer, are mostly situated in the hottest, noisiest and most airless parts of central Suva. A few of these people are threatening that if they

cannot unearth more congenial living conditions they will join the ranks of those who now contemplate packing up.

The spiral does not end at the hotels.

Sooner or later the few boarding-houses will raise their rates, as will those people who provide private board. And it is common talk that increased rates at the Chinese and Indian restaurants are a certainty—a prospect which is agitat ing everybody who depends on these places regularly or for frequent, casual meals.

THE present uproar comes from a small but essential part of Suva’s popu lation. Behind it is the ceaseless complaint of the masses of workers of all races caught in the inflationary rise.

If the wages of the workers from over seas are substantially increased to keep them in their jobs, there 'will be an inevitable sequel for lower-paid workers, and so on until the crash comes.

The basic fact is that despite controls Fiji’s cost of living has gone through the ceiling. Compared with any other country on earth, the workers—Euro pean, Fijian, Indian and others—have been commendably patient. It is signifi cant that the first group to stage a moderate and justified revolt is ex clusively European.