CONFIDENTIAL
1.
"We are
coming out of an era of emergency action to ameliorate massive and immediate problems, into an era in which we can hope to think in terms of refining and sophisticating over a wide field the quality of the various Services we try to make available to the public".
(Sir David Trench: October 1971).
Final Address to Legislative Council,
A visitor hears less today about the knife edge on which Hong Kong's prosperity has over the years been said to rest. If this knife edge did exist it has developed a stubbornly upward bending curve. Domestic exports over the last ten years have grown at the rate of nearly 16 per cent annually and the numbers employed in registered and recorded irdustrial undertakings have increased in the same period from about 230,000 to 613,000 (September 1971). Improved social services have reflected some measure of this growing prosperity improved hospital and health services; free primary education and increased secondary school places;
extensions of the public housing programme (the number housed in Government and Government-assisted housing has almost doubled since 1964); and the new public assistance scheme introduced early in 1971 and already under review for improve- ment.
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2. Labour conditions have shared in this general upward move, althougn here the labour troubles of 1967 gave the first real impetus to legislative change since 1958 when the progres- sive reduction of the 12 hour day and 7 day week for women and young persors, to a 10 hour day and 6 day week was begun against much opposition. Market forces have played a part. Persistent labour shortages and competition for labour have combined to improve wages steadily over recent years, in real as well as absolute terms. Since 1964 the average industrial wage has increased by 96%, while in the same period the cost of living based on the modified consumer price index has risen by about 33%, producing an increase of about 48% in real terms. (This average annual increase of about 5.8% compares with a growth in GNP of an estimated 9-10% annually.) Nevertheless the absence of effective trade union organisation and the limited possibilities of effective representation of local worker opinion, impose a special responsibility on the Labour Department and the Government of Hong Kong for the improvement of labour conditions by legislative and administrative intervention. The events of 1967 and gathering business prosperity have fortunately created a greater readiness for change and the past four years have seen the enactment of a considerable number of pieces of labour legislation - none of them very dramatic - which collectively however have much improved the lot of the industrial worker. But there are signs of renewed complacency among the business community, lulled by four years of comparative industrial calm. Labour Department, in carrying forward the next stages of its legislative programme, will need all the support it can muster from the official level in the Hong Kong Government.
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The
CONFIDENTIAL