“A Road With No End”: Making the South Pacific a Permanent Labour Reserve

ABSTRACT

Commencing in the 1980s and picking up pace over the last two decades, there has been a systematic campaign to construct a specific form of labour market in the South Pacific. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers are recruited on short-term contracts to work in agricultural industries in Australia and New Zealand. While the employment is on a casual basis, with workers required to return to home countries upon the completion of contracts, there is nothing temporary about the intent behind what are termed labour mobility programmes. This article examines the conditions in countries from which workers are recruited, where non-development reigns. Continuing internationalisation of agriculture, logging, mining, oil and gas production has undercut whatever existed as late colonial policy to bring national development. Low rankings on international indicators of health and literacy, widespread unemployment and under-employment, characterise populations where majorities are reproduced for the forms of labour required by labour mobility programme recruiters, local and international. Continuous shortages of labour for fruit picking and packing in the region’s two largest economies are joined with relative surplus populations in nearby South Pacific countries. Temporary work is married to permanent accumulation on a road with no obvious end.

KEY WORDS:

• Capitalism
• non-development
• labour mobility
• unemployment
• impoverishment
• casual employment

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article and to the editor and reviewers of this journal for their suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The introductory phrase is the title of Mochtar Lubis’ (2018) novel covering immediate post-World War II events in Indonesia and the struggle for forms of freedom during the transition to national independence. It is chosen here to refer to the condition of contemporary capitalism, including in the South Pacific, where non-development produces a continuous supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, in this case for agricultural enterprises in Australia and New Zealand. While the social reform tradition suggests that Islanders are better off employed as casual wage workers on farms overseas than unemployed and impoverished people in their home countries, this article rejects that construction of freedom. Instead, the concern here is how did those two forms of existence, freedoms subject to the authority of capital, become the available alternatives in conditions which appear to be permanent.

2. One prominent state institution is the Development Policy Centre at the Australian National University, headed by former World Bank and AusAID economist Stephen Howes, which proclaims: “Labour mobility is key to the future of many Pacific island countries, and is an important research focus of Devpolicy.” Research for the Centre primarily involves advocacy for further recruitment and transportation of workers (see Development Policy Centre 2020).

3. The countries, with dates in brackets when these became nation-states and recent population estimates, are: Cook Islands (1965: 17,459), Fiji (1970: 896,445), Kiribati (1979: 119,449); Papua New Guinea (PNG) (1975: 9 million), Samoa (1889: 198,705), Solomon Islands (1978: 686,884), Tonga (1970:106,000), Tuvalu (1978: 11,823), Vanuatu (1980: 307,000). Although not in the South Pacific, Timor Leste (2002, 1.3 million) is a recent addition to the targeted labour migration countries.

4. The spontaneous process is reflected in Adam Smith’s well-known “invisible hand” and Marx’s famous punning aphorism “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!” The recognition of capitalism’s negative effects was instrumental in the formulation of other state policy prescriptions of the early to mid-nineteenth century, including liberalism, conservatism and socialism (see Fawcett 2014).

5. These countries had provided the initial locations for the extensive literature on the effects of non-development known by the acronym MIRAB, that is migration, remittances, aid and bureaucracy that characterised their economies.

6. Leys (1996, 18) makes the wider international point that in general post-independence governments had less commitment in practice to development goals than was often claimed.

7. Labour migration increased subsequently, although numbers have been affected by the coronavirus outbreak (see below). There is also the distinction between numbers of jobs and numbers of workers, some of whom have been employed repeatedly on different jobs, which needs to be kept in mind when assessing the extent of the programmes.

8. Sullivan and Brann (2020) note that during the height of the pandemic, which caused widespread unemployment in Australia, there was a continuing drive to import ni-Vanuatu workers to pick mangoes in the Northern Territory.

9. More recent efforts to extend labour recruitment to include additional skilled workers are not examined here. Nor is the recruitment of ex-military personnel from Fiji for employment overseas, including in the Middle East and elsewhere, as contract soldiers and security guards. In any case these workers are skilled, that is formally trained, and not the unskilled, with no training and semi-skilled (trained on the job) which are the object of labour migration schemes.

10. The countries examined were Fiji, Kiribati, PNG, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu and (Western) Samoa. True to the conception of “development as economic growth,” the IMF study of “developments in the 1980s” does not mention capitalism, globalisation or changes in state and class power that might explain slower growth and rising unemployment in Fiji. Instead, the study was full of what had become the international language for policy prescriptions, including “adjustment,” which commenced in the late 1970s with Latin America, then shifted to Africa with the Berg Report (World Bank 1981).

11. The effects of illiteracy continue for individuals recruited to work in Australia. For the recent case of two Fijians, see ABC News, July 7, 2020.

12. This HDI ranking should probably be even considerably lower (see Filer et al. 2016, 106 and Fn.1).