Category Archives: labor

by | 9 September 2012 · 8:29 am

Castilian Economy, 1501: All for Wool

From Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott (Penguin, 2002), 2nd ed., Kindle Loc. 2057-2076:

In spite of the increasingly grave problem of the national food supply, Ferdinand and Isabella adopted no vigorous measures to stimulate corn production. On the contrary, it was in their reign that the long-continuing struggle between sheep and corn was decisively resolved in favour of the sheep. The great expansion of the mediaeval wool trade had revitalized the economic life of Castile, but there inevitably came a point at which further encouragement of Castilian wool production could only be given at the expense of sacrificing agriculture. This point was reached in the reign of the Catholic Kings. The importance of the wool trade to the Castilian economy, and the value to the royal treasury of the servicio y montazgo, the tax paid the Crown by the sheep-farmers, naturally prompted Ferdinand and Isabella to pursue the policies of their predecessors and to take the Mesta under their special protection. As a result, a whole series of ordinances conferred upon it wide privileges and enormous favours, culminating in the famous law of 1501 by which all land on which the migrant flocks had even once been pastured was reserved in perpetuity for pasturage, and could not be put to any other uses by its owner. This meant that great tracts of land in Andalusia and Estremadura were deprived of all chance of agricultural development and subjected to the whim of the sheepowners. The aims of this policy were obvious enough. The wool trade was easily subjected to monopolistic control, and, as a result, it constituted a fruitful source of revenue to a Crown which, since 1484, had found itself in increasing financial difficulties, exacerbated by the flight of Jewish capital. An alliance between Crown and sheepowners was thus mutually beneficial for both: the Mesta, with its 2½ to 3 million sheep, basked in the warm sunshine of royal favours while the Crown, whose control of the Military Orders gave it some of the best pasturing lands in Spain, could draw a regular income from it, and turn to it for special contributions in emergencies.

There were no doubt certain unintended advantages to Castile, in the intense royal encouragement of the wool industry. Sheep-farming requires less labour than arable farming, and the vast extent of the pasture-lands helped to produce a surplus of manpower which made it easier for Castile to raise armies and to colonize the New World. But on the whole the favouring of sheep-farming at the expense of tillage can only appear as a wilful sacrifice of Castile’s long-term requirements to considerations of immediate convenience. It was in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that agriculture was confirmed in its unhappy position as the Cinderella of the Castilian economy, and the price which was eventually to be paid for this was frighteningly high.

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by | 17 May 2011 · 6:46 am

Cameroon Tales: Two Cooks

For most of his recent sabbatical in Cameroon, my brother stayed in a big hilltop white-elephant of a house overlooking a small village on the busy main highway between Yaoundé, the capital, and Douala, the main port city. The house was the ostensible headquarters of a personal NGO owned by an international businessman from that village, whom my brother had once helped get started in the business of importing cars from Europe into Cameroon. As village benefactor, he had later acquired overseas aid to build and maintain a village well, build a nursery school, and build his own seldom-used mansion.

My brother’s housemates there were three men from neighboring Central African Republic, speakers of a Gbaya language called Suma who were working on documenting their language, on a project funded almost entirely out of my brother’s own pocket. He has known the elder two men (now in their 50s) since the late 1970s, when he was working for the Peace Corps and then USAID in the then Central African Empire.

To feed himself and his team, my brother asked to hire a cook from the local village. The sleazy caretaker of the mansion, a childhood friend of the benefactor now in his 40s, recommended the 16-year-old girl living with him, who soon proved that she neither knew how to cook nor cared to learn, even when an older woman was hired to help teach her.

One day the young cook got a call from her elder sister telling her that the latter’s baby was very sick, and asking for help. My brother offered to give her an advance on her salary, since it was so near the end of the month anyway, so that she could send some money to her sister. But her man (the caretaker) took that money, beat her, and forbade her to visit her sister. The cook then came to my brother and asked for more help, but the caretaker swore that he never beat her (even claiming she had attacked him), and that he never took her money, only “put it aside” in order to prevent her leaving to go take of the sick baby.

Although the cook threatened to leave the caretaker—just as she had earlier infuriated her family by running away from home to be with him—she soon relented, made up with him, and returned to work as if nothing had happened. Nevertheless, her enthusiasm for cooking never improved, and my brother finally fired her a few weeks before we arrived for our visit.

The replacement cook was far from a spoiled brat. She was the devoutly religious, 30-something mother of four young children whose husband had abandoned her in Kribi, on the south coast, whereupon she tried to find her sister, who had married into the village where we stayed. She ran out of cash in the market and crossroads town nearest her sister’s village, but a taxi driver from the latter village was kind enough to give her and her brood a free ride to her sister’s house, which had only one room to spare for her and her four kids.

Lacking land and a husband, she resorted to gathering forest herbs for sale by the roadside to earn a little cash. The village chief’s unmarried son dallied with her for a while, but he was very likely scared off by the prospect of raising her four kids (although she blamed it on his inability to abide by her strict religious scruples). The chance to cook for a household of foreigners was a godsend—except for the jealousy it aroused among the other villagers.

She proved a diligent and capable cook who used her new supply of cash to rent some land and pay a crew to clear a field for planting—all just in time for the start of the rainy season. And she was finally able to pay the village medic to treat her two-year-old boy for worms.

When it came time for my brother and his team to leave the village, he promised her whatever food supplies remained in the kitchen. She didn’t show up for the good-bye party, however. Instead, she waited out behind the kitchen until after darkness fell and all the guests had left—so that no one would see her carry the extra food to her sister’s house, and then spread gossip about the passing good fortune of one of the most destitute women in the village.

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by | 26 January 2011 · 9:06 pm

Common People’s Christianity in Gunma, 1880s

From: American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 1859–73, by Hamish Ion (UBC Press, 2009), pp. 269-271:

Although many missionaries, unlike their Japanese colleagues, came from rural farming backgrounds (and thus possibly had a better appreciation of the importance of farming to national strength), they were restricted to the treaty ports. Unless missionaries were employed at Japanese schools or obtained leave to go into the interior for health reasons, they were not free to leave the treaty ports. Thus, the rural evangelistic effort had by necessity, to be largely conducted by Japanese evangelists. By 1884 thirteen churches had been established in the Kantō prefectures.” Kudō Eiichi has pointed out that the ten years from 1877 to 1887 saw a tremendous growth in the Protestant movement, much of which came from the creation of new churches in rural areas.” This growth owed a lot to the activities of students who had studied in Tokyo or Yokohama, where they had contact with Christians returning to their hometowns and villages in the provinces Back-up to the activities of returned Christians came from members of the new city churches in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe, joined shortly afterward by students from the Nihon Kirisuto Ichi Kyōkai Shingakkō in Tsukiji and the Dōshisha school in Kyoto.
…
As Christian activities in Annaka and Maebashi reveal, one of the first areas to be opened up was Gunma Prefecture, an agricultural area to the west of Tokyo with strong ties to the silk-exporting trade through Yokohama. The opportunities for rural economic development as a result of the silk trade helped to open this area to Western machinery and Western ideas. It was in Kiryū that evangelists belonging to the Shin Sakae Kyōkai were able to establish their first church among the rural folk in this important region. In its early years, the Kiryū Kyōkai lacked both a permanent worship place and a resident minister. It grew nevertheless because of the energy of visiting evangelists and its own members. In sharp contrast to many of the first converts in Yokohama and Tokyo, who were shizoku (descendants of samurai), the Kiryū Christians belonged to merchant and farming families. Indeed, the first shizoku member of the church, Ishii Yasaemon, became a member in August 1883 and was the 117th person to be baptized in that church. In microcosm, the challenges that the Kiryū Kyōkai faced help to explain how a Christian community was able to take root in a country area and shed more light on what church activity entailed for country Christians. Sumiya has pointed out that Gunma Christians were different from their counterparts in other places where shizoku had made up the majority of converts because Gunma Christianity was the common people’s Christianity (heimin no kirisutokyo). This was certainly true in the case of the Kiryū Kyōkai….

Between 1878 and 1888, twelve churches were established in the prefecture, with a total membership of 1,466. Among them was the independent church Nishi Gunma Kyōkai, Takazaki Kyōkai, established in May 1884 by Hoshino Mitsuta. The evangelistic power and vitality of the young Dōshisha graduates who formed the vanguard of the Kumiai Kyōkai’s endeavour in Gunma is reflected in the ownership of these twelve churches: nine belonged to the Kumiai Kyōkai, and only one each to the Nihon Kirisuto Ichi Kyōkai, the Baptists, and the Methodists. The majority of the churches were on the main road leading west across Honshu toward Niigata, as was the case in Kiryū, Maebashi, Takasaki, Annaka, and Harashi. Some of these also were on the route of the railway – Isesaki, for instance. Ōhama has pointed out that Gunma Prefecture had 985 Christians in its churches in 1888 and ranked fifth in terms of numbers of Christians living in Japanese prefectures or major cities, and, at 14.75, fourth overall in terms of Christians per thousand of population.

This adds new perspective to our visit to international Ota City in Gunma, which is now home to Japan’s largest Braziltown and has the highest proportion of foreign workers of any prefecture in Japan.

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Filed under Brazil, economics, Japan, labor, migration, religion

by | 15 August 2010 · 12:05 pm

China’s Chopstick Threat

Today’s LA Times contains an op-ed calling attention to the forests being consumed by China’s enormous output of disposable chopsticks, which I suspect have nevertheless played a significant role in reducing the spread of communicable diseases (as have disposable hypodermic needles, which constitute another sometimes nasty environmental threat). China’s government is now trying to discourage their use.

The disposable chopstick, made largely from birch and poplar (and, less so, from bamboo, because of its higher cost) begins to look deeply menacing — an environmental disaster not to be taken lightly. Begin with China’s 1.3 billion people. In one year, they go through roughly 45 billion pairs of the throwaway utensils; that averages out to nearly 130 million pairs of chopsticks a day. (The export market accounts for 18 billion pairs annually.)…

Calls to abandon the use-and-toss type began more than 10 years ago and have since persisted unabated. By 2006, the activism had become more strenuous: Citizens launched a BYOC (Bring Your Own Chopsticks) movement, which continues to gather momentum….

Yet, more than 10 years later, the targeted disposable remains with us. Why?

First, while we in the West don’t give much thought to a chopstick “industry,” in China, where 100,000 people in more than 300 plants are employed in the manufacture of the wooden utensils, it’s most definitely a flourishing enterprise. And just as jobs trump environmental issues in the West (think the coal, oil and logging industries), the argument that 100,000 jobs are at stake is a refrain that carries considerable weight. As Lian Guang, president of the Wooden Chopsticks Trade Assn., told the China Daily in 2009, “The chopstick industry is making a great contribution by creating jobs for poor people in the forestry regions,” adding that melamine-resin chopsticks are hardly a sanitary substitute with their “high formaldehyde content.” His mention of melamine resin is an effective touch, I admit.

Then there are the restaurants. The alternative to wooden disposables is sterilizing the tableware (plastic, metal or durable wood chopsticks) after each use. But the cost differential is significant: Disposables run about a penny apiece, while sterilization ranges from 15 to 70 cents. Restaurants, especially the low-end ones, worry about passing the costs on to customers. And the worry would seem to be warranted: Consumer advocacy groups from 21 Chinese cities published an open letter in March arguing that the costs of sterilization should not be passed on to consumers as the food safety law obligates restaurants to provide free, clean and safe tableware.

Are paper shopping bags a threat to North American forests?

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Filed under China, economics, food, industry, labor

by | 20 February 2010 · 7:51 am

Dutch Mennonite Industrial Pioneers in Java

From: Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, tr. by Wendie Shaffer (National U. Singapore Press, 2008), pp. 125-126, 134:

The story of the [Karel] Holles and the [Eduard and Rudolf] Kerkhovens in Priangan would appear to bear little resemblance to that of the aristocratic lifestyle of the landed gentry of West Java or the leaseholders in the Principalities. In Dutch historiography they are described as hard-working Dutch Mennonites who started growing tea in primitive circumstances and were proud of their social involvement. Their style of entrepreneurship however, was not essentially different from that of the paternalistic rule of the powerful landowners of West Java or the leaseholders of the Principalities. The Holles and the Kerkhovens were, like the first generation of planters in the Principalities, forced to move between various cultures and lifestyles in order to acquire the necessary knowledge capital and labour force. Just as in the Principalities, contacts with a British trading house were crucial; in this case it was the firm of John Peer & Co. in Batavia. This firm introduced the Holles and their Kerkhoven nephews to tea cultivation in British India, which was at that time far more highly developed than in the Dutch East Indies.

Holle earned fame as an expert in the Sundanese language and as a promoter of local agriculture. He published many articles on both these subjects, and his brochures were translated into Javanese by the Wilkens and Winter families. In acknowledgment for his groundbreaking recommendations about rice cultivation and his contributions to the reform of government-directed coffee production in Priangan, in 1871 Holle was decorated with the title of Honorary Adviser for Native Affairs. An intriguing aspect of the Holle story is his well-known friendship with Muhammad Musa, chief penghulu (Islamic religious leader) of Garut, whose sister he was to marry. More mundane, but equally important, was the fact that without his knowledge of Sundanese, Holle would never have been able to grow a single row of tea bushes. Whereas in the Principalities (unpaid) labour of the Javanese peasantry was generally included, as it were, with the lease of land, in Priangan Holle had to recruit his workers himself. Hence he set up small shops and provided housing for his loyal employees — which included the women tea pickers. Incidentally, other landholders in West Java had already done the same thing. Like the legendary Major Jantji, Holle too created his own image; he was wont to wear a turban and flaunt precious rings on his fingers. In this way he demonstrated that — notwithstanding his simple lifestyle and approachability — he was also the tuan besar, the great lord. Although his business collapsed in the great crisis of 1884, the image of him as a benevolent landlord survived after his death, and a monument was unveiled in his memory This too, fitted into the tradition of the Indies, where similar monuments had been put up for other memorable landlords.

Such monuments suggest the specific manner in which certain landlords wished to be remembered in Sundanese history — that is, as development workers avant la lettre [i.e., before the term existed]….

The sugar barons of the 19th century have received scant applause from historians. They gained their wealth from exploiting slave labour (as in the Caribbean) or corvée labour (as in the Principalities). Easily won wealth turned them into bloated and reactionary bosses, a picture that continues to persist. Leaseholders are still seen as a curb on the development of modern production methods. But in fact, the Creole sugar planters in both the New World and the Old were usually forward looking and up-to-date with the latest technology of steam and steel. The planters and commercial entrepreneurs in Central Java who built a railroad track to transport goods to the coast had been preceded by the Cuban sugar producers. Both groups understood the political and technological signs of the times. In 1870 the leaseholders of the Principalities went ahead and founded the Indisch Landbouwgenootschap (Agricultural Society of the Indies), which had its headquarters in Surakarta and by 1874 already numbered 669 members throughout Java. It published its own newsletter run by Frederik Adriaan Enklaar van Lericke, an indigo planter in Surakarta. We shall meet him later in the role of a propagandist for agricultural colonies for the benefit of impoverished (Indo-)Europeans. The newspaper DeVorstenlanden started in 1870 in Surakarta, advocated the interests of the planters. It was no coincidence that these initiatives appeared at roughly the same time: they evidenced a growing self-awareness and the increasing role of science in agricultural industry.

I suppose one could make a similar case for the sugar barons of Hawai‘i—if they hadn’t taken over the government as well.

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by | 25 November 2009 · 5:24 am

Lind on Patrician Do-gooder-ism vs. Populist Producerism

Old-style Democrat Michael Lind asks a timely question in a Salon essay entitled Can populism be liberal?

There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama’s White House — and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires’ club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.

To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately “densified” cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.

Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election — universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.

It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don’t need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal’s emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today’s progressives seem to have internalized the right’s caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.

This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.

via RealClearPolitics

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by | 10 October 2009 · 11:00 am

Salonica’s Polyglot Boot-blacks

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 12-13:

IN THE 1930s, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.

But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers—drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure—penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century—though no earlier—there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands—maps. As for the archives, they are endless—Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American—compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multiconfessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world—as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages—to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.

The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that elsewhere Greeks too lost out—in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon, Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of 1922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.

Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe—in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw, Vilna and Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trauma caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of nation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property after 1948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier? Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the remnants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country garden an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving their memories of a city that is long gone.

By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica’s Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street pedlars are entering Salonica’s bloodstream. Many of them quickly learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city’s position within the modem nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to Greek hands has become ancient history.

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by | 9 October 2009 · 6:48 am

Changing Demographics in Pacific Seafaring

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 178-180, 188:

As well as improvements in maritime education and training under IMO regulations, there has also been a veritable social revolution in Fiji. The young generation of Pacific sailors no longer seriously ascribes to the old tradition that females bring “bad luck” to a ship. Pacific women have shown considerable strength of character, as well as new professionalism, in taking charge of crews and in coping with family….

The other change in human relations in Fiji has been an amelioration within the maritime sector of the sensitive issue of race relations. The exclusion of all but indigenous Fijians from the Waterside Workers and Seamen’s Union, which was registered in 1946 with a specific racial limitation clause, continued until a rival unsegregated seamen’s union emerged in 1992. The reasons for the initial segregation are deeply embedded in colonial history. However, with the increase of Fijians as wage earners in ports and shipping, trade union exclusiveness seemed as much a matter of class as race. Ports and shipping had Fijian laborers and ratings, while Europeans and part-Europeans were officials and officers. Capital in turn came from the United Kingdom and Australasia and locally from Indo-Fijian commercial sources. The more class-conscious union organizers saw the Fijians as “workers” and the others as “bosses” who were not eligible for union membership.

The mobility of a few Fijian ratings with sufficient education to junior officer levels and the increase of indigenous Fijians serving as cadets and officers on local vessels have reduced the basis for class resentment. There are still racial problems, but younger Fijian sailors recognize the merits of Indo-Fijians as mariners. For example, the Khan family on the island of Nairai have long been regarded as good sailors, running their own cutters with Fijian officers and crew….

The global hierarchical structure is broadly 40 percent officers from countries in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), plus Russia, Poland, and some of the eastern European states, and most of the ratings from eastern Europe and developing countries, including some Pacific islands.

Increasingly, young men and a few women from the Pacific are moving to officer ranks on foreign-flag ships, as there is a dire shortage of officers in the developed ship-owning states. The shortage is due to both declining interest in careers at sea and the losses of trained personnel arising from demands ashore in business, technology, and administration for well-qualified mariners. One of the several advantages to Germany, for example, of recruiting lower-cost sailors in Kiribati and training some of them to officer levels is the lack of well-paid employment in islands for their skills, which would attract officers ashore. Thus there is a minimizing of wastage from manpower training investments. There are twelve maritime training institutions in the Pacific Islands. Only Fiji and Papua New Guinea provide the full range of education and training from pre-sea, rating, and officer courses to Class 1 foreign-going masters and chief engineers. Several other places offer training of ratings and/or junior officers. There is mobility in training, with concentrations for special courses under the coordination of the SPC Regional Maritime Programme….

Kiribati in 1959 (as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands crown colony, GEIC) was already supplying seafarers to the China Navigation Company of Britain. There were also crews and a few I-Kiribati nationals serving as officers, usually with European captains, on colony ships sailing on long-distance interisland routes. In terms of distance, Kiribati shipping was virtually foreign-going…. Kiribati is now the principal country in the Pacific island region for supplying seafarers.

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Filed under economics, education, Fiji, labor, Micronesia, Pacific, Papua New Guinea

by | 5 October 2009 · 8:58 pm

Tok Pisin with Isuzu Lu: Banana long Maket

Isuzu Lu: Banana long Maket

Isuzu Lu: Banana long Maket

Lu: Inap tenpela yia nau mama bilong mi yet i bin karim ol banana long maket … Nau tasol mi baim dispela strongpela Isuzu na mama i amamas tumas ….

Lou: For ten years now my own mother has carried bananas to market … Only now I bought this sturdy Isuzu and mama is very happy …

Bird: Mi amamas tumas tu / I’m very happy too

Mama (with pipe): Kam yu putim hia … / Come put it here …

Sitting lady: Nating bai mi tokim pikinini bilong mi long baim wanpela tu … / I think I’ll tell my kid to buy one too …

Standing lady: Mi, tu / Me, too

This is a scan from a faded old photocopy of a cartoon ad by Bob Browne for New Guinea Motors in the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, 1976. According to the Foreword in Isuzu Lu Book 5, Browne’s Isuzu Lu ads paved the way for locally created cartoon strips in PNG newspapers. The Phantom was among the most popular strips in 1976.

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by | 26 September 2009 · 4:53 pm

Preference for Pacific Island Seafarers

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 102-103, 106:

As a result of continued shortages of crew, British and American ships frequently sailed shorthanded for the Pacific. The trips involved passages that were four to five months long, via the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. American ships sometimes picked up a few sailors in the Atlantic Islands but generally shipowners were not unhappy with depleted crews, which reduced labor costs during these unproductive legs of voyages. Not so for the disgruntled seafarers whose lives were endangered from shortages of experienced shipmates in bad weather and when beating around Cape Horn against strong headwinds.

Arrival in the trading and whaling areas of the Pacific entailed supplementing the crew, all the more necessary because ships would lose many of the original crew during the three to four years the men were employed in the Pacific. Most losses were due to desertion….

The cautionary note on the recruitment of Samoans as sailors reflected the persistent bad reputation of those islands, arising from the massacre of the boat’s crew of La Perouse in 1787. [I believe La Pérouse was the name of the commander, not the name of his vessel.—J.] Whalers by the 1820s were likewise returning with stories of treachery and savagery experienced in parts of Melanesia and Micronesia. Such tales led to more misgivings regarding taking crew from several of these islands. The situation was different in Tahiti and Hawai‘i, where local seamen were encouraged by chiefs to serve and showed reliability even in difficult Arctic voyaging. Several Hawaiians are recorded to have been on that coast in 1788 under Captain John Meares. The New Hazard increased her crew from twenty-four to thirty-three in 1811 for voyages to the northwest coast, additions that were simply designated as “kanakas” in logbooks and journals. The ill-fated Tonquin had a Hawaiian crew of twenty-four when it was destroyed possibly by the captain after Indians boarded on the coast, and the fur trading ship Beaver took on ten “kanakas” in 1812, together with an experienced island sailor, bosun Tom. American whalers subsequently obtained most of their crews in Hawai‘i and Tahiti and also periodically at the Marquesas, the Carolines, and New Zealand….

Captains clearly preferred Pacific seafarers, who were used to compliance toward chiefs and thus unlikely to give captains trouble by demanding seafaring customary rights on board. The islanders were useful too as interpreters and understood the Pacific ways of trade. As sailors they were skillful at handling loaded boats through heavy surf when ships had to stand off and on. On whalers they acquired reputations as good harpooners and for boldness in closing on a whale. The keen eyesight of island sailors earned them the tobacco bonuses for spotting whales, and this, along with reading the signs of the sea for sudden squalls and reefs, made them invaluable as masthead lookouts.

Swimming and diving proved other important assets. Turnbull was impressed when, on approaching Hawai‘i, he encountered people a mile offshore supported only by “a thin feather-edge slice of wood.” He refers also to Hawaiians diving from topgallant yards and swimming under the ship. This skill of deep diving was employed on pearling and bêche-de-mer ships, as well as for making underwater hull repairs and clearing fouled cables. The extent to which island men and women were at home in the sea is further alluded to in dramatic rescues. Copping describes how, when the Harriet of Sydney was totally lost near Te Puna in April 1840, “the crew would have been lost also if it had not been for the Maori women on board the ship swimming them ashore.” He relates also that when his own whaleboat broached to, and he was knocked overboard and trapped under the boat, a shark “lay hold” of his shoulder, but “my harpooner a Maori jumped overboard after me.” Similarly when James Bagley fell from the topgallant crosstrees, a Hawaiian seaman, John Mowhee, dived after him and told Bagley to hold on to his shoulder until they were rescued.

For the shipowners a more compelling reason for employing Pacific seafarers was their lower costs in wages and victualing. The whaleship owner F. Parbury, who gave evidence at the British House of Lords Select Committee on the Navigation Laws, readily attested to this and expressed preferences for New Zealand (Maori) crews.

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