Gold is no ordinary metal; many cultures use it for important occasions, like marriage, and to signify individual wealth or style. But æAtu Emberson-Bain reminds us of the suffering that lies behind the shine.
Stories of indigenous workers laboring for the international export economy are often ones of misery, but Emberson-Bain is right to concentrate on the oppression of Fiji's native gold miners in this extraordinary history.
The author roots through government, corporate and academic archives in Fiji, Australia and England to find a smoking gun of corporate misconduct.
Trouble in the mines started decades ago, when indigenous Fiji workers were paid barely subsistence wages and forced to live in crowded, disease-prone metal sheds. The white overseers of these workers, mostly from nearby Australia, refused to provide the workers with adequate nutrition or even basic safety equipment: boots, eye goggles and effective ventilation.
If an unshod worker of the 1930s cut his bare foot on a tool lying in the dark shaft, he was criticized for his carelessness and sometimes sent away from the camp at his own expense, notes the author, who interviewed many miners and mining company executives during more than a decade of studying worker issues in Fiji.
While today's Fiji mine workers do have boots and safety goggles, many of the workers and the families still live in spartan settlements of humid metal sheds, many of which have only communal bathrooms and washtubs located some distance from the dwellings.
Fiji's mine executives frequently studied managerial techniques in South Africa, the author notes, reinforcing their own racist and anti-worker practices. Like their counterparts half a world away, Fiji's non-Native mine executives used racial politics to segregate workers - white, Asian Indians and Natives of Fiji's many islands - and to keep them from finding the common bonds that are the building blocks of collective action.
Disparate pay scales kept the generally more highly trained whites and Indians from joining forces with the indigenous workers. Regardless of their abilities, indigenous workers were rarely given anything but the most dangerous and miserable jobs: chipping and loading tons of rock from dark, hot, humid, water-filled shafts deep beneath the earth's surface. Though Native mineworker unions have finally emerged in recent decades, their rise was slowed by corporate policies that cut back on the number of workers, thereby pitting union members against each other in a struggle to remain employed.
Emberson-Bain wisely avoids the overheated rhetoric that might come naturally to such a report. Instead, the author lets the facts speak for themselves. Rather than condemn the mine camps in chapter after chapter, for example, the author simply quotes shocked British health inspectors who, as early as the 1930s, condemned company-mandated living conditions in the mines of this long-time British colony.
Gold, which once comprised more than half of Fiji's exports, now accounts for less than one-sixth. But the industry remains responsible for a wide variety of health and ecological disasters - leaking ponds of hazardous mineral remnants, fouled air and water and a laundry list of health problems affecting miners and their families.
While the West certainly does come off unfavorably in this book, colonial offices and corporate executives are not the only culprits identified. Emberson-Bain notes, unlike some revisionist analysts, that Fiji's Native elites were partially responsible for the plight of Native workers. Native community leaders gladly helped build the mining industry in return for what they erroneously imagined would be greater control over the members of their tribes. Fiji, now independent from the British Empire, has been through various civilian and military governments which have sometimes joined forces with corporate interests to keep worker organizations weak.
This well-researched book also contains a wide variety of detailed economic statistics on the history of gold mining in Fiji. What is missing, and which the author could not provide, is a happy ending.