COLONIAL RULE IN HONG KONG
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think, on balance, it is a sweat shop. Yet, for all that their declared motive for embarking on the study was a Fabian desire to show up abuse, and the material must therefore have been selected sometimes in order to focus on the bad rather than the typical - photographs of the Cultural Revolution disturbances in 1957 arc included as if they were of workers protesting against social hardship - the description of conditions is not unfair to Hong Kong, let alone a misrepresentation of the facts: it is, on the contrary, an unequalled treasurehouse of information and a monument to the conscientiousness of both authors.2
All the same, one cannot leave the matter there - not least because the authors themselves do not: there is hardly an episode in the narration on which, differing from Dr Miners, they do not pass instant judgment. Often their criticisms would occur spontaneously to any reader; that is par- ticularly so with the pigheaded conduct of some of the employers in labour disputes, whether or not the rascals got away with it. Few readers will quarrel either with the conclusion that, if legislation favourable to workers could be enforced after a dispute had disturbed the peace, it could have been introduced before and saved the heartbreak; in the case of the notorious blind-workers' dispute, this applied to administrative changes as well. On the other hand, if one is governing a society which generally thrives on "minimum interference", there is something to be said for not anticipating need; no Fabian would approve of legislative restraint in the field of public security before its necessity was proved empirically up to the hilt, so why in the labour field? We are told that the Trade Board Ordinance's powers to fix minimum wages in particular industries where there is unfair treatment of workers is a dead-letter sop to ILO conven- tions, but also that, during the two decades of industrial growth, employers have steadily raised wages of their own accord; in spite of that, say the two authors, it would be a good thing for the government to take additional powers to prescribe minima even where wage rates are not notably depressed. Who would determine how the government should exercise those powers? In the opinion of the authors, it appears, a Hong Kong TUC with greater dominion over the workers than the present one- a dominion acquired by compulsory membership, by renoval of the ban on obstruction and intimidation by strike pickets, and by exemption of individual union members from liability for civil consequences of their actions in furtherance of disputes. Past anxieties over picketing arose from its degeneration into gang riots between KMT and CCP supporters, but can now safely be forgotten, they seem to argue, since Peking's entry into the UN has brought the Communists respectability and taken the steam out of the KMT machine; as a result, trade union activity in Hong Kong, if given its head, can confidently be expected to falow the ideal model we have in Britain. "A growth of formal workplace targaining, within a framework of procedural rules and improved safety and welfare conditions laid down by the Government, could offer the suret guarantee [until Hong Kong ceases to be a colony] of eliminating the grosser forms of inefficiency, exploitation, and injustice."
The dismissal by Professor Rear and Mr England of differences in industrial behaviour between Britain and Hong Kong as due to ephemeral