This is a video about Fijian labour history.
“Definition of blackbirding:
Blackbirding refers to the recruitment of [eg, Fijian] people through alleged trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland [in Australia].”
By Terry Cook:
Fiji: Public sector workers strike against junta’s austerity measuresThe British government meanwhile shows the hypocrisy of its purely symbolic “opposition” to the coup d’etat in Fiji, by continuing to recruit Fijians as cheap cannon fodder for George W. Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars there, while military recruits‘ numbers in Britain are down; from Fijilive:In defiance of threats by the Fijian military regime, more than 10,000 government workers began an indefinite strike on August 2. The strikers are members of the Public Employees Union (PEU), Fijian Teachers Association (FTA) and the Viti National Union of Taukei Workers (NUTW)—all affiliates of the Fiji Islands Council of Trade Unions (FICTU).
The strikers joined more than 1,600 nurses who walked out on July 25 over the same issues—the government’s budget decision to cut the pay of public sector workers by 5 percent and axe jobs by lowering the retirement age from 60 to 55. In the small Pacific island state of just less than a million people, the strikers represent a significant section of the organised workforce.
The British High Commission in Wellington says that the recruitment of Fijians into the British army is completely separate from its diplomatic stance over the December coup.It was earlier reported that Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, and the Commonwealth Secretary General, Don McKinnon, had been lobbying against the recruitment all year.
