14
for grievances and workers' expectations, which
employers are careful to keep in touch with.
Communication in smaller firms is heightened by the
frequency of family and clan connections between
employer and employee, or identity of regional
origin and association. The workers for their
part, understand the highly competitive nature of
Hong Kong business, and the vulnerability of
Hong Kong industry to external competition, and
are not anxious to prejudice their firm's (or the economy's) viability by excessive demands.
(iv) Again, the refugee background and the political
situation of Hong Kong (the 1997 expiry, etc) makes
the workers take a short-term view. They value
immediate material gain (ie cash now) rather than
longer-term social improvement. They are broadly
satisfied with the gains brought by their labour
market situation and the paternalistic policy of
employers. Moreover, they are not interested in
(for instance) sacrificing immediate money gains
for such things as improvements in social security.
In any case, the Hong Kong worker is not
collectively-minded, and does not identify in a
class or occupational sense, as do the workers of
other industrial economics.
(v)
Identification is
rather with the family group. At the same time, the
family (which often includes several earners)
-
provides the individual worker with support in hard
times which makes other forms of collective
association or social security unnecessary. And
there is a further "fall-back" in the self-
employment sector (street-hawking and so on) which
is still important in Hong Kong, and which unlike
the "informal sector" in developing economies
generally does not provide substantially lower
earnings than those in less-skilled wage-employment.
(vi) Finally, workers do not think of advancement in
collective terms because they are in general
ambitious as individuals, and intend rather to get
/on