‘Discrimination’ cry expats

About 350 angry Britons and New Zealanders working for the PNG Government want their own governments to intervene in a wages dispute. They’re angry, in the first in stance, because they get less pay than Australians in PNG and they weren’t told this when they signed up.

But now they’re angrier still because the PNG Government has refused to allow an increase granted to them by arbitration.

The public servants accused PNG of political expediency, of abdicating its industrial integrity and of repudiating established employer employee responsibilities.

“This leaves us free to take the issue to our own governments,” Mr John Edge, a spokesman for the group, said.

The controversy, which could affect the recruiting of specialised skills from overseas, is one of a series stem ming from PNG’s strange four-tier wages structure. Overseas public ser vants are recruited on the basis of at traction related to their homeland wage scales.

This gives Filipinos working in PNG a higher wage rate than PNG nationals, but the Britons and New Zealanders get more than the Filipinos, and the Australians get the most.

Filipinos working in PNG have already claimed “an outrage to our national dignity” and have asked President Marcos to intervene on a government-to-government basis.

More than 300 public servants have been brought from Britain and New Zealand over the past two years as teachers, lawyers, engineers, accoun tants and technicians.

An arbitration tribunal recently granted them increases of up to K 2400 on grounds of need, although the total wage scale was still lower than what Australians get.

But the Minister for Labour, Mr Gavera Rea, announced that the award would be disallowed by the government. He said an inquiry would be established to review the whole question of overseas recruiting.

On behalf of the bitter Britons and New Zealanders, Mr Edge said the government had demonstrated it would ignore any decision that did not suit it, even when the decision came from its own industrial structure. He believed PNG had effectively remov ed itself from the market of being able to attract the expertise it needed from overseas.

He claimed that some Britons and New Zealanders could no longer sur vive financially in PNG, and that their contracts should be ended with ter mination benefits.