15
maximum allowance of twenty four days a worker has to be continuously em- ployed with the same employer for two years and three months. If he goes sick for fourteen days after working for eleven counting months he only gets the allowance on eleven days and when he returns to work he must start building up his entitlement of sickness days from scratch. No allowance is payable for an absence of less than four consecutive days or if a medical certificate is not produced. The allowance itself is at the rate of half pay; not the two thirds level recom- mended by the ILO (England and Rear, op cit). The take up on the scheme is pathetically low, and is it any wonder? But for the worker in pain there is al- ways the dope peddlar with his promises of quick relief. At least one in every ten working males is a drug addict. The rate of TB infection is amongst the highest in the world.
There is still no minimum wage, and no restrictions on the hours of work of adult males. In the absence of strong trade unions the abstention of the law from these areas can be construed as govern- ment encouragement of sweated labour.
In 1940 the Trade Boards Ordinance was passed which gives the Governor power to set up wage fixing machinery in certain trades where he believes wages to be unreasonably low." The Ordinance has never been activated. It does, however, have a use in that it enables the Hong Kong Government to claim that ILO Con- vention No 26, which calls for the estab- lishment of wage fixing machinery, has been applied in Hong Kong without modi- fication.
Mass redundancies and lay offs are an integral part of the system, yet there is no provision for fall back pay and no protection against unfair dismissal. A bill to protect the conditions of apprentices has been delayed by the employers on the Executive Council. Maternity leave re- mains unpaid. And hundreds of thousands of self-employed, outworkers, and casual day labourers are totally without any legal protection at all. It is a striking fact that in Hong Kong most of the case loads
of social workers are made up of people who are in work.
Finally, the status of the Hong Kong worker as a mere expendable factor of production is emphasised in the daily toll of death and disablement. The total num- ber of reported occupational accidents in 1971 was 27,192; in 1974 it was 31,014. In 1971 there were 81 accidents a day; in 1974 there were 86. The Government's approach to the problem has been weak; the courts have been irresponsible in the low levels of fines imposed upon guilty employers; and the employers have merely ignored it. As one of them told a reporter: no factory owner in Hong Kong likes to see profits sliced. We em- ploy workers who can handle the machines properly and we don't want to spend our time sending them to these courses. After all, we pay them for the job" (Hong Kong Standard, 26 Febru- ary 1973). In 1973 power driven machin- ery killed thirteen people and caused 5,994 non-fatal accidents. A comparison of Hong Kong health and safety legisla- tion with that of the United Kingdom reveals that the laws are crude and omit a number of particularly important provi- sions (England and Rear, op cit). Such legislation as there is is confined to in- dustry. Outside industry there are no re- gulations governing safety, hygiene, and the physical conditions of employment. Finally, there is no contributory insur- ance scheme to provide compensation for injury (just as there is no contributory in- surance against sickness). Instead, com- pensation is available under a system of workmen's compensation — a system stunted in concept and riddled with ano- malies. It was first adopted in Hong Kong seven years after the post-war Labour Government had abandoned such a sys- tem in the United Kingdom and replaced it with national insurance.
social welfare
Since the 1967 Report on Social Security, and the riots of that year, there have been a number of improvements in pro- vision. Indeed, government expenditure on social welfare rose from HK$26.3 mil-