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industrial worker in March 1975 was £2.70 a day, including fringe benefits. Be- cause of higher wage rates it is now commonly claimed in Hong Kong that the Colony is no longer competitive in basic manufacturing with Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, or Indonesia. There is truth in this claim and the pic- ture sometimes presented in Britain of Hong Kong workers on starvation wages can be refuted with ease by the Hong Kong Government and employers. As previous pages have shown, the major problem in Hong Kong is not earnings but the miserable lack of protection against the vicissitudes of human exist- ence: the Hong Kong worker needs a "social wage."
However, the picture of earnings is not as rosy as the Hong Kong Government and various surveys portray. In the first place, earnings quoted in surveys are generally the result of very long hours spent at work. Comparisons between countries are rarely quoted on an hourly basis. Secondly, the statistics on wages and earnings quoted by the Hong Kong Government are supplied voluntarily by the largest employers. These are generally the highest paying employers. Sixty per cent of the industrial labour force is em- ployed in factories with fewer than 200 workers, and their wages do not keep pace with those in the big firms. A glimpse of the desperate position of many wage earners was provided by the 1971 Census which showed that there were 41,457 heads of household earning less than HK$200 (about £14 at that time) per month. The Government was reported in March 1974 to regard a family as poor" if it had an income of less than HK$400 a month (R. Porter, International Labour Review, May 1975). Thirdly, the official statistics do not allow for lay offs, periods of unemployment, and short time working. The amount in the worker's pay packet can fluctuate considerably from week to week. There are 95,000 casual workers hired by the day or hour, or at particular seasons of the year, who con- stantly depend for work upon the whims and favours of others. Moreover, the cost of living has to be taken into account. Due to the stock market collapse, the
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drastic increase in the world price of oil and the world recession, the level of real wages has actually been falling in Hong Kong since March 1973, so that they are now back to 1970 levels. Finally, the basic fact which should never be lost sight of is that Hong Kong is not a de- veloping economy." It is a rich city state half the size of Greater London yet ex- porting more than the whole of India. But it is a political economy which ensures. that "the worker gets not what he earns, or what the market forces in a so called laissez faire economy decide is a fair re- turn for his labour; he gets what his masters deem surplus to their own re- quirements" (Far Eastern Economic Re- view, 25 March 1974).
education
Education in Hong Kong has five characteristics; it is neither free nor compulsory, it does not provide enough school places for all who need them, it is desperately competitive, and the system depends very heavily upon a large private sector which regards education as a busi- ness. Each of these characteristics clearly inter-relates with the other. In line with its individualistic philosophy the Govern- ment regards sending children to school as being the responsibility of the parents, and is reluctant to use compulsion for the same reasons that were advanced by the opponents of the UK Education Act, 1870. Some concession to the ideas of 1870 was made in 1971 when the Director of Education was given powers to enforce primary school attendance (up to the age of twelve) where parents appear to be unnecessarily withholding their children from school. But these powers
" will be exercised by the Director only after a careful investigation of the family's cir- cumstances and the needs of the child" (Hong Kong 1975). The Director has no power to enforce attendance over the age of twelve.
Nor has free education ever been accepted as a principle. Since September 1971 education has been free in all gov- ernment maintained Chinese language primary schools and in the majority of