As people continue to experience high costs of doing business, low productivity, and crisis in terms of skills and labour, introducing a totally new wage system is very unreasonable.
Fiji Commerce and Employers Federation (FCEF) chief executive officer Edward Bernard made these comments following the campaign by the Fiji Trades Union Congress (FTUC) to push for an $8 an hour of national living wage.
Mr Bernard said in the last five years, minimum wage had increased by 115 per cent and in the same period, remittances had also increased.
He said “we are now at $1.3 billion, and that’s going directly to the households”.
In the last three years, he added the three national budgets passed by the coalition Government had packed in a lot of targeted incentives on social protection for the vulnerable members of the community.
He said despite that, people continued to experience high costs of doing business, low productivity and crisis in terms of skills and labour.
He added that Fiji already had four wage-setting systems – the minimum wage, sectoral wage, collective bargaining where unions negotiate with companies with the cost-of-living adjustments factored into that, and performance management system where companies reward or give increments to staff members based on performance.
“Introducing a totally new system, a living wage, in a small economy, I think is very unreasonable at a time where you’re also facing this fuel crisis,” Mr Bernard said.
“The federation feels that we should improve the gaps in our current system at the moment,” he said.
“For example, for minimum wage, we do not have a formalised minimum wage council, and we have encouraged governments to formalise that so that genuine tripartite discussions can happen.”
He said there was also no guideline to set minimum wage rates, and that was important because “we cannot be continuously plucking figures out of thin air without evidence to support the recommendations of unions, therefore, a guideline is very important”.
He added there had been no ratification on the International Labour Organization Convention 131 on wage-setting as well.
He said that was important because it would guide the country to ensure wage-setting was done in a very efficient but also in an evidence-based way that also included genuine tripartite discussions.
