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340 miners in Vatukoula, Fiji have been waiting 19 years for a resolution in their industrial dispute with Emperor Gold, and they are going to wait a little longer. Earlier this month the miners met with Fiji's interim government seeking compensation. "They made a submission and we listened to them," Permanent secretary to the Prime Minister's Office, Pio Tikoduadua, told the Fiji Times on the 21st. According to Tikoduadua, a response on government's position would be made within the next 10 days. "They have a long list of grievances.” he said.
Indeed they do. In its decades of operation, Emperor Gold has given workers plenty of reasons to be aggrieved. When Fiji's first Labour Party led government came to power in the 1980's, with the support of a militant organised labour movement, Emperor Gold chief executive Jerrrey Reid, a New Zealand stockbroker that The Age described as “ferociously anti-union” took a no holds barred approach to defending the company's interests. Reid actively supported the 1987 coup that overthrew Fiji's first multi-ethnic, working class aligned government. The coup stunted independent political development in a country with an electoral system divided on ethnic lines, a legacy of British colonial policy. In a 2003 speech Labour Senator Dr ‘Atu Emberson-Bain stated that Reids support of the coup was “because for the first time the company faced the prospects of a government that was going to stand up for the indigenous mineworkers, and the Nasomo landowners.”
When on February 27, 1991 miners walked off the job, Emperor sought and won a court injunction declaring the strike illegal. They went on to sack 436 workers in the following days. Riot police, fed, housed and transported by the company, were brought to Vatukoula to secure company premises and evict sacked workers from their homes. These events are on top of the poor living and working conditions miners experienced, and the dismal pay. After nearly two decades, its time the workers were compensated. We should know by the end of the week what line the new government will take.
