Reagan makes it legal:

No wage rises

With a stroke of the pen, President Reagan re duced the wages of some 2,300 American Samoan workers and granted citizenship to 400 others.

This was the effect when he signed into law the Omnibus Territories Bill in late August.

Both provisions had been sup ported by the government of American Samoa (ASG).

An estimated 2,000 tuna plant workers had been prom ised a wage increase from $2.82 per hour to $3.35 in July as a result of U.S. Department of Labor action. A smaller group, perhaps 300, also lost their wage increase as a result of the president’s signature.

The wage issue was set in motion more than 30 years ago with the passage of one of the mainland’s many minimum wage Bills creating an automa tic mechanism for the review of wages in the offshore territories

whose minimum wages were below that of the mainland now $3.35 an hour.

This is reviewed every two years by a committee appointed by the Governor of American Samoa and the U.S.

Secretary of Labor. This year that commitee decided that wages in the tuna industry must rise at once.

It also laid out timetables for other industries to bring wages up to the national minimum.

But since a company must have gross sales of $362,500 before it is covered by committee pronouncements, most small enterprises are unaffected.

The ASG and the tuna com panies were not slow to react The government launched a series of legal challenges while Star-Kist Samoa and Samoa Packing Company joined it in suing the Department of Labor.

Meanwhile, however, the otherwise non-controversial

Omnibus Territories Bill was moving through the Congress where Congressman Fofo Sunia helped include in the Bill a provision to roll back the proposed wage increase. The Congress and Senate agreed without paying too much atten tion. The White House accepted the Bill.

The workers, (many of them Western Samoans holding the least attractive jobs in the can neries) could wave farewell to their wage increase.

In a series of submissions, ASG had claimed most strongly that although only a few of its workers would be affected by the increase, the resultant rais ing of the entire wage scale could cost it between $5 and $3l million a year.

It was claimed that ASG taxes would have to be in creased, that 2,100 workers would be laid off and even that the remodelling of the

Rainmaker Hotel would be en dangered.

The question of how many of the country’s 10,000 workforce would benefit and by how much was not addressed.

Meanwhile, another part of the same Bill extended U.S. national status (roughly equal to citizenship) to some 400 Samoans bom outside Amer ican Samoa or the U.S. to one, but not two, American Samoan parents.

Sunia had worked hard to tie this provision to the Omnibus Bill.

The beneficiaries will be able to secure U.S. passports, vote, own land in American Samoa and work for those parts of the ASG that require U.S, national status for employment.

Most of them now live in American Samoa but were bom in Western Samoa. from David S. North in Washington.