Homesick Fiji

workers in NZ "wept on the job"

Reports reached Fiji in March of a breakdown in the Fiji farm labour scheme operating in the Wanganui district of New Zea land’s North Island this summer.

District organiser of the scheme, Mr. J. N. Tripe, said farmers were disappointed because indiscriminate selection had given them unsuitable workers.

He said he recalled cases of Fiji workers becoming too homesick to work. They wept on the job. Illness, too, resulted in men being sent home.

The cost to the Wanganui district alone in men sent home with their work undone, and others who were unsatisfactory but remained for their four months, was SNZ3O,OOO.

Mr. Tripe suggested a system whereby farmers could nominate the Fiji workers they wanted—possibly reliable ones whom they’d employed during previous seasons.

But, in Suva, Fiji’s Department of Labour has rejected Mr. Tripe’s “nomination” suggestion, on the grounds that it had been tried in the past and abused in both Australia and NZ.

No nomination system

Secretary and Commissioner for Labour, Mr. T. R. Vakatora, said that neither the Fiji nor New Zealand labour authorities would entertain the idea of a nomination system. How ever, Mr. Tripe’s comments about selection methods in Fiji were being considered and the system would be tightened up.

He pointed out that some problems in NZ may have been caused by the fact that too' few members of the work teams understood English. Mr.

Vakatora said Mr. Tripe was practic ally the only farmer he met during his recent trip to NZ who complained about the present system. Most farmers had been quite satisfied and so had the NZ labour authorities.

He said, too, that he had seen little evidence of homesickness or un willingness to work—and claimed the “failure rate” among the 500 workers who went to NZ during the summer had been no more than about five per cent.