Paper short abstract:

Many young i-taukei (indigenous) Fijian men today engage in frequent, difficult un-paid rugby training despite the precarity of their lives, and the uncertainty of overseas careers to which they aspire. Just price for labour must deal with the social embeddedness of work.

Paper long abstract:

Extending just price to labour markets is particularly complicated at the margins of global industries, where work, hope and precarity intersect. Many young i-taukei (indigenous) Fijian men today aspire to achieve social, material and geographical mobility through rugby. They hope to ideally obtain a lucrative professional contract overseas through which some acquire sufficient resources to transform their and their families’ lives, or alternatively amateur contracts overseas or recruitment into the Fijian institutions with prominent rugby teams (Fire, Navy, Corrections, Army, Police). They value rugby partly because of its important symbolism for Fijian (ethno)national identity, i-taukei communities, and ideas of appropriate masculinities. They experience difficult un-paid rugby training as a complex mixture of pleasure, self-development and work: pursued as an alternative to formal education, as a symbolically empowering activity, as fun-filled time with friends and kin, and as an investment in hope from precarity, but always in relation to differing socio-economic, geographic and (rugby) professional positions. Employment through rugby remains precarious, dependent upon recruitment by unknown, unseen agents, contingent upon seemingly chance encounters, subjective evaluations and luck. These agents take into account certain physical and social qualities in pricing, choosing players based upon physical tests, subjective evaluation of matches and signs of a reliable pedigree, such as participation in regional representative teams, elite rugby schools and national academies. Coaches look for qualities which indicate the potential for exceptional, even innovative work, but also a degree of reliability. However, contracting processes fail to recognise the individual and communal work invested in raising the young men to be rugby players. Ultimately a just price would take into account the production of people within dynamic systems of hope and social significance, recognising monetary and non-monetary forms of value.