As cabinet has given approval to comprehensively review Fiji’s national minimum wage and the 10 minimum sectoral wages, the Fiji Commerce and Employers Federation has re-iterated that the Government must strengthen the technical, legal and institutional frameworks for wage setting in Fiji.
FCEF CEO Edward Bernard says they do not have a minimum wage council to allow for tripartite discussions and nor do we have a wage policy or criteria to ensure transparent and evidenced based wage setting in Fiji.
Section 264 (W) of the Employment Relations Act (ERA) requires the Minister to establish a criterion and therefore, the Ministry is already in breach of the labour law.
Bernard highlighted that it was only a year and five (5) months ago that the national minimum wage rate was last increased by 11.1 percent (from $4.50 to $5).
He says this was made without a set criterion, outside of tripartite discussions and no disclosure of data and evidence collected.
The CEO says the final report went from the consultants to the Ministry and a unilateral decision was made.
However, Bernard says they are encouraged by Government plans to include wages trends, labour market and economic conditions and productivity levels as part of the announced wage reviews.
He says these, including the huge in-bound remittance and Government’s social protection benefits that workers and households are benefiting from, are also equally important to include in the study.
Bernard says in June this year, FCEF along with the FTUC and the Ministry participated in an ILO organized Wages Workshop.
He says the ILO presented that Fiji’s mean and median wages were comparatively higher than 16 countries outside the Pacific, including Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico.
Bernard highlights that Fiji was in a similar situation when it came to gender pay gap.
He says in July this year, FCEF officially wrote to the Permanent Secretary for Employment, Productivity and Workplace Relations, Maritino Nemani, highlighting its above concerns and also encouraged the Ministry to commence the technical and legal work necessary to ratify ILO Convention No. 131 (Minimum Wage Setting).
Questions have been sent to the Ministry of Employment.
