Spotlight On

P-Ng's Rural

Workers

From a Port Moresby Correspondent

Papua-New Guinea’s 40,000

rural workers—mostly plantation

labourers—are currently in the spotlight. This is a state of affairs which no doubt would astonish them if only they were aware of it. rFHE spotlight has been sent their J- way as a result of the establishment just before Christmas of a Board of Inquiry into Rural Wages, which has the job of deciding whether: • Wage rates should be varied. • A bonus payment system should be introduced. • The current payment system of wages, plus rations and quarters, should be altered. • The maximum period of service for agreement workers should be varied.

The last similar inquiry, by the Native Employment Board, in 1960, was also fairly extensive.

The pressure for the new inquiry has not come from the rural workers themselves, but, oddly enough, from urban workers.

Rural workers have not expressed dissatisfaction over their wages, but urban workers certainly have, and under the unusual union arrange ments currently operating in the Territory (where “workers’ associa tions” thrive with the active en couragement of an Administration which is conscious that if it doesn’t help nurture these embryo unions to active life then some red-hot imported unionists might) it was only a matter of time before the associations suggested that some body ought to look into the urban situation too. The Administration agreed without demur.

Workers Well Represented The Board of Inquiry so far has had a couple of hearings, at Lae and Madang, and others will follow at various centres, probably until June. Board chairman is the Sec retary for Labour, Mr. N. J. Mason, but another will have to be found soon because Mr. Mason has ac cepted a new post in Sydney.

Other members are Mr. lan

Downs, Highlands planter; Mr. W. J.

Grose, a New Ireland planter; Mr.

B. E. Fairfax-Ross, general manager of the British New Guinea Develop ment Corporation and probably the most experienced man in the Ter ritory on plantation labour con ditions; Sapume Kofikai, vice president of the Goroka Workers’

Association and an Agriculture Department man; Thomas Tobunbun president of the Rabaul Workers’

Association, a schoolteacher; and Lamsisi Pasingus, treasurer of the New Ireland Workers’ Association, who is an experienced co-operatives man. The workers—i.e., the union ists—are thus well represented.

Adventure Rural workers have always had something of a unique role in the emerging New Guinea. For many bushmen who have never seen the sea or a paved road, a two-year agreement to work on the coast is entered into in a spirit of adventure.

The experienced planter with a line of unskilled “busbies” on his hands (brought in by air charter perhaps at a cost of £5OO for the return trip) doesn’t expect to get anything more than he pays for, and accepts it as adventure too, if he is wise. Both sides learn something from the experiment and thus

education-by-example continues.

Whether the actual skills a bushman picks up in his two years are worth the effort—a Highlander working on the coast may be grow ing things he’ll never see again when

World Bank Supports Cash Wage

he goes home—is a problem that the Board will look into.

Not all rural workers are under agreement. The trend is for an in creasing number of natives to work casually (most of them in their own areas).

About half of the entire native work force in the Territory (about 95.000 are in employment, which is little more than 13 per cent, of the estimated adult male population of 600,000) is engaged in agriculture and forestry. Probably about 26,000 of these are agreement workers and 13.000 are casuals.

Cash Wage

An agreement worker for the first year gets a minimum of 30/- a month, and 35/- in his second year, plus accommodation, food, clothing and other articles.

One of the terms of the Board’s inquiry is to see whether this scale should be replaced with an all-in clusive cash wage, as it largely has in the towns. Deductions would be made for food, accommodation, etc.

The World Bank Mission, in its reports released last year, strongly supported the movement towards a full cash wage because it felt it would help workers become familiar with modern economy.

Casual workers are paid weekly, with no extras.

Agreement workers are expected to honour their agreements, although nothing much can be done about it if they don’t.

Casual workers, free to pick and choose, usually choose with shrewd ness, and experienced planters see frequent proof that wages are not their motivating force.

Men will work for the minimum wage if the plantation is the right one. Some will leave higher wages to work at a plantation with lower ones because they prefer to work under a particular manager, or they like the general atmosphere, or other conditions. Often it is because they prefer the food.

Biggest Question

Recently in some parts of the Highlands there has been a shortage of kau-kau and labourers have been leaving plantations where they think they have been issued with too much rice.

Probably the biggest question of all for the inquiry to solve is: If the rural worker is to earn more so that his living standards may be improved, how can rural industry pay for it?

Those close to the industry say that higher wages can be paid only when the worker can be made skilled enough to improve production figures. In other words, his value must be increased.

But are present conditions in the industry such that he has the op portunity to increase his worth?

This opens up many new avenues.

Many in the rural areas are pain fully aware that rural industry gets mighty little Government money considering the amount it earns for the Treasury each year.

The millions being spent in the Territory too often go into roads, expensive housing and blocks of offices, all in the towns, where they earn nothing for anybody.

For those who adopt this line there was more grist for the mill only the other day, when it was announced that Port Moresby’s sprawling European suburbia of Boroko, occupied by Administration workers and their families, mostly from Australia, is to have a new post office—at a cost of a mere £200,000!

There is an argument for a new post office there, as it will eventually be a GPO, but must money be spent now on post offices, court houses and other buildings when so much needs to be done to build up the economy? This has been the burden of the World Bank Mission’s report—and the rural inquiry may well think the same.