6
12.
This note therefore concentrates on three questions:
(1)
(2)
Why, despite frequent attempts by international union
agencies and the current expressed sympathy of the
administration towards collective bargaining and more
highly organised industrial relations, should trade
unionism remain so weak in Hong Kong, and collective
bargaining be so little developed?
GA
Why should there apparently be little pressure from
employees themselves for improvement in social provisions
of the kind normal in industrial societies and
considerable uncertainty as to their support for some
recent legal provisions, such as that to introduce a
week's paid holiday?
(3) Should anything be done to change matters in either of
these respects, and if so, what (tentatively) should be
the main direction of development?
ΙΙ
Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining
13. The major facts of the trade union situation can be set out without
excessive detail for immediate purposes. At the last count, registered
trade unions claimed just over 360,000 members. As a percentage of all wage and salary earners, union membership (after having been stable, at
least in paid-up terms, through the 1960s) would appear to have been
increasing fairly steadily for several years since, as follows* :
Nominal Membership
% of estimated employees
Year ending
(1000's)
1970
195
16
1971
221
17
1972
250
18
1973
296
21
1974
317
1975
361
22
24
/14. At
* Percentages from 1973 onwards are taken from the Annual Departmental Report of the Commissioner of Labour; those for previous years are a private estimate. In 1972, the Commissioner's report stated the
percentage of union members to be 15% of the "total workforce",
presumably including the self-employed. summarised in England & Rear's Table 9. "British Rule", which much of the factual data in this review updates.)
Earlier figures can be found (Chinese Labour under