Far from being the main cause of the cost of living overseas, dock dues remain an essential pillar of financing communities and protecting local production. This is the conclusion of a report commissioned by the Association of Mayors of France and the Association of Overseas Municipalities and Communities according to “Localtis”. According to our colleague, this study has a disturbing conclusion for supporters of the dominant system in Reunion: the consumer society imported by French neocolonialism.
Indeed, in the article on this study published on January 10, “Localtis” writes:
“Moreover, the income gap between residents is 28% with the mainland (France – Editor’s note) but with significant inequalities between the “in” (civil servants and private sector executives) and the “out”, the “excluded”. of the system”, often far from the labor market. “The market is organized to respond to the purchasing power of the “in”. It’s a bit like if a worker from the North had to do his shopping at Bon Marché in Paris,” summarizes Nadia Damardji, director of the APC firm, which carried out this study. Remember that in former colonies that have become so-called overseas departments or communities, tenured civil servants benefit from excess remuneration. This extra remuneration increases the salary by 53% in Reunion, it is officially called “cost of living bonus”. This excess remuneration also exists for employees in the private sector, generally at a lower rate.
Prices aligned with the income of the richest
The overpayment of tenured civil servants in Reunion Island increases salaries by 53%. It is presented as compensation for the higher cost of living than in France. This “cost of living bonus” also exists for certain private sector employees. However, this system leads to a vicious circle. Merchants adapt their prices to the income of this wealthy population, creating a market geared towards the richest consumers.
Meanwhile, the majority of the population faces high prices without financial compensation. This reinforces the feeling of exclusion and widens economic inequalities.
How to support purchasing power without creating inflation?
Excess remuneration aims to compensate for the additional costs linked to remoteness and insularity, but it produces perverse effects by increasing the cost of living. Consideration is needed on ways to support purchasing power without creating inflation. Alternative options could include severe price controls and the development of short circuits with neighboring countries to reduce the costs of importing what we cannot produce. This requires the necessary transparency on price formation. Indeed, if mass distribution is going to source from Madagascar rather than from France, prices will have to fall and not be kept the same to increase the profits of shareholders in this economic sector.
This questions the basis of the neocolonial regime imposed on the Réunionnais: recycling public transfers in the form of salaries and social benefits into private profits repatriated to France. Large-scale distribution is an essential player in this privatization of public funds.
Overpayment: one of the pillars of the neocolonial system
Remember that the excess remuneration aimed to create in Reunion Island a sufficiently numerous social class with the purchasing power necessary to create a new market: the purchase of products imported from Europe to promote jobs and wealth in France. Paris also wanted to set new benchmarks in mentalities to extol the relevance of this neocolonial system: the mode of consumption of this social class had to become the model to follow. We had to change mentalities by persuading the people of Reunion that they had to consume as if they were in France even though they did not have the rights of French citizens. This social class took power in most institutions in place of the old sugar cane aristocracy. Paris has thus placed at the top of the social ladder a class whose income is totally disconnected from the creation of wealth in Reunion on the one hand, and which is totally dependent on Paris for the income of those belonging to the public service of elsewhere.
Suffice to say that raising the debate on this subject is very disturbing and shows how difficult it is to change mentalities to move towards a structurally egalitarian Meeting.
M.M.
